


On the impossibility of reality

by defractum (nyargles)



Category: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-21 19:21:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 25
Words: 56,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7400464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyargles/pseuds/defractum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Inception,” says Ichirou Moriyama.</p><p>‘You’re crazy,’ Neil does not say, but it’s a close thing. “It can’t be done,” he says instead, after a too long pause.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>An Inception AU. Kevin is the best extractor in the game, Neil spends too much time pretending to be other people, and Andrew? Well, Andrew knows all about inception.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be a long one!

"Inception," says Ichirou Moriyama.

‘You're crazy,' Neil does not say, but it's a close thing. "It can't be done," he says instead, after a too long pause.

Ichirou does not look at him, but at Kevin instead. Neil fights a scowl. He doesn't want the attention of the likes of Ichirou Moriyama anyway.

Next to Neil, Kevin very carefully does not move; he is unnatural in his stillness, and that makes Neil turn to look at him too. "Kevin?"

"It's complicated," says Kevin. _But it can be done_ hangs in the air.

"I understand," says Ichirou, and draws out a cheque book. Neil watches him write out an absurd amount of money, and thinks, _You_ ** _definitely_** _do not understand._ Neil's not stupid enough to ruin their facade of a united front when they're facing a new client, so he settles for giving Kevin an appropriately squinty glare instead; Kevin studiously avoids eye contact.

"I need to know the target and the idea first," says Kevin quietly, though Neil notices that he only speaks up after Ichirou's finished writing the cheque.

Ichirou holds up a hand, and one of the men standing behind him passes him a dossier. He sets it down on the coffee table, too low to be comfortable for any of them apart from Neil, and flips the cover to reveal a photograph on the top.

Both of Neil's eyebrows rocket into his hairline as Riko Moriyama looks back out at him. "Your brother?"

"Yes."

Neil waits for an explanation. Kevin is too busy staring at the picture. He knows Riko too well, from a lifetime ago, back when dreamsharing was in its infancy and Kevin was the military's rising star, Riko its undisputed genius.

"He is," says Ichirou, "inconvenient."

"Oh," says Neil, throwing up his hands. "Then by all means, let's fuck with his head."

"Neil," says Kevin warningly, as he finally pushes the picture aside to look at the rest of the documents.

Ichirou watches the interaction between them, missing nothing and yet not caring one iota. "I want him to try to usurp me," he says.

Neil stares at him. "Why?"

"Because," says Ichirou as if Neil is being particularly dense, "then no one will mourn him when he dies."

A shiver runs down Neil's spine. Ichirou looks still, almost serene and Neil suddenly knows that the only thing worse than taking this job would be to not take it. Kevin is frozen next to him, his hand still resting on a stack of building schematics.

Neil swallows as his brain scrambles to keep up. Kevin's useless right now, and there's a lot they need to know if they're going to pull this off. If they're going to pull this off. He still doesn't believe in inception. "Do you have a deadline?"

"Soon, I suggest." Ichirou tears out the cheque, and slides it across the table. "Half up front, for expenses. The rest, paid on completion." Neil's never going to have to work again after this. (Then again, it's not like Neil does this for the money.)

Neil takes it, folds it carefully and slides it into his pocket. He closes the folder, pushing Kevin's hand out of the way, and packs it carefully into his bag. He's probably going to have to do his own research too, but it's a start.

"Now," says Ichirou, raising his hand again. His lackey steps forward again, this time with a silver briefcase. He sets it on the table, open to reveal the familiar tubes and mechanisms of a PASIV. Ichirou rolls up one arm sleeve, and waves a hand to indicate that they should do the same. "Join me."

"What," says Neil, narrowly swallowing the two words that nearly tumbled out after that. "Why?"

Ichirou passes him cotton pads of steriliser, and Neil takes them, automatically reaching for Kevin's elbow. Ichirou swabs himself with a practiced hand. "So, Mr Wesninski, you will not be tempted to do it again."

**One hour later (alternatively, three minutes later)**

"I am going to shoot myself," says Neil. Impatience cracks through his voice.

"No!" Kevin barks at him. He doesn't even turn back to look at Neil, concentrating instead on running. "Not yet."

Neil huffs, but palms the gun he'd just dreamed up instead. They're in a vague replica of the hotel they'd met Ichirou at, though they'd been deposited in the lobby instead of a private suite. They'd pretended to be casual, strolling towards somewhere less open. It hadn't really worked; heads had snapped towards them as Neil kept them slow and steady, blending in with the other ‘guests'.

They're at a huge disadvantage really; Ichirou had come in already anticipating a dream, so his projections are on high alert. Neil had modified his appearance the moment he'd moved out of sight, giving himself dark brown hair and an extra eight inches.

By now, the floor is drumming with footfall, Ichirou's subconscious actively trying to seek them out. They've been found twice already – Neil is studiously ignoring a broken nose and Kevin is cradling one broken hand to his chest with the other.

They've moved into the residential areas, where the carpets muffle their footsteps and the corridors will limit how many projections of Ichirou's subconscious can fit through at once. Neil isn't great at building dreams, but he knows the easy way, which is to collapse walls on top of projections. They're fast running out of hotel, and Kevin's idea of building more is just to create endless winding corridors.

The walls start to close in around them so that the corridor is barely wide enough for one person at a time. Neil shoots a startled look at Kevin before realising that this is Ichirou's work, not Kevin's; he puts on a burst of speed and squeezes past Kevin, stretching his legs out to the fullest.

Behind him, Kevin barely manages enough spare breath to groan, "Fuck you, Josten."

The sprinklers burst into life over them, drenching them in seconds, and the fire alarm starts wailing. Room doors start bursting open up and down the corridor, revealing dozens of Japanese businessmen armed with briefcases and, even more alarmingly, a wizened old lady holding a meat cleaver. Neil barrels past a couple on sheer momentum before one of them bodychecks him into the wall.

He gasps, and rolls away, grabbing one of the opened doors and smashing it into their face. He dives into the room, swinging the door shut behind him, blinks at himself in the mirror. Blond hair becomes black. He smooths down his shirt, and it folds into a suit. He picks up his new briefcase and rejoins the fray.

Kevin is getting mobbed outside. He's given in, dreamed himself up a gun because it's not about stealth anymore, and is shooting as fast as he can. Unfortunately, that's not fast enough. Neil slides in whilst his back is turned, and smacks him across the back of the head with his too-heavy briefcase. Kevin sinks like a rock, and is immediately set upon. Neil takes the chance to just fucking shoot himself already.

When Neil wakes, Kevin is looming over him with a disapproving frown. Neil knows what he wants to say, but there's Ichirou, already standing and removing the needle from his arm. Neil follows suit, recoiling the tubing out of habit.

"Three minutes and six seconds," reports one of Ichirou's men.

"Congratulations. That is the longest anyone has managed to stay inside my mind," says Ichirou.

"Thanks," says Neil, surreptitiously checking his nose. "Good militarisation you've got going on there. Top notch. A+. Let's not do that again."

"Indeed," says Ichirou, and leaves them alone with a vast amount of money and a serious amount of planning.


	2. Chapter 2

They manage to wait until the elevator door has closed before they begin to fight. Kevin jabs the button for the fourteenth floor harder than he really needs to, and says, "You killed me. Again."

Neil responds with, "What the fuck is wrong with you. Inception? We were going to stick with easy jobs. We were going to build up a cash bank." And a reputation, one that Neil sorely needs more than Kevin. Everyone knows who Kevin Day is.

"There's no such thing as an easy job when the Moriyamas are involved," says Kevin, obviously still sulking over being bashed in the back of the head and being torn from limb to limb.

"So we'll just say we can do it and wait for them to fuck us over when we can't then, do we? How is that the better option?" Neil paces around the small elevator, mildly frustrated that the posh, plush carpet is drowning the sound of his stomping.

"We will do it." Kevin folds himself into the corner, and crosses his arms. Neil scowls at him via his reflection, and Kevin gives him a narrow stare back. Neil knows that stare. That stare makes Neil whirl around and look at Kevin properly.

Kevin repeats himself: "We will do it."

"You don't even know if it's possible," says Neil, struggling to hold on to his fraying temper. "It's a theory, thrown about by academics who don't know what it's like down there. An urban legend."

"It's been done before," says Kevin. The hard set of his jaw tells Neil not to ask any more.

The elevator pings; the door slides open. Kevin pushes himself away, and strides down the corridor to their room, leaving Neil to catch up behind him.

Neil's mind is whirring, pulled in a thousand directions all at once. He's itching to ask Kevin for more details, but that would invite his own past up to more scrutiny, and one of the best things about Kevin is that he doesn't ask questions, he just cares about Neil's ability to do his job. He tries to think about the job instead, pulling out the folder on Riko. He drops it onto the bed without opening it; he can't even begin to imagine how to pull off inception. He doesn't even know if Kevin was the one who's done it before; it could have been done by anyone. It could have been done by Riko.

"We need a team," says Kevin, unaware and uncaring of Neil's mental angst. "A proper team."

"Thanks," says Neil sourly.

"I know some people," says Kevin, ignoring him and digging up his phone.                        

Neil flops over onto the bed. His contacts are sticking to his eyes, as they always do after he spends time in a dream. He blinks more times than is necessary. "I thought we were trying to keep a low profile. A bigger team is going to be harder to hide."

Kevin is already ringing his first contact, and looks at Neil while the phone connects. "We've already attracted the worst kind of attention we could have."

Neil sighs. After all, it's not his fault that Ichirou Moriyama came knocking at their door, it's Kevin's. Neil's been working with him for almost a year now, short easy stints followed by months of mostly-functional alcoholism. If it weren't for how good Kevin is at what he does, Neil wouldn't be here at all. And neither would Ichirou.

They've not needed more than two people for the jobs they've taken so far, mostly taking on jobs where Neil is the distraction and Kevin the extractor, not dissimilar to a simple pickpocketing method, and Kevin's extensive contacts list has meant that they get more than enough referrals.

Whoever is on the other end of the phone picks up. Kevin wastes no time. "I need you. I'm coming to get you." He hangs up. Stares at the window for a moment. Turns to Neil, and abruptly says, "We need levels."

Neil is taken aback, both by the ease with which Kevin can get people to work with him and by his frankly appalling social skills. "What the fuck are levels?"

Judging by the look Kevin gives him, he is similarly appalled by Neil's lack of knowledge. "Levels. Dream levels? Levels within a dream?"

"I got that," says Neil, whose urge to punch Kevin Day in the face is rising by the moment. "But what are they?"

Kevin sighs. He picks up his bag, hefting it over his shoulder. "I'll explain on the way."

They'd planned to stay the night, but apparently not anymore. Neil fishes his duffel bag out from under the bed and grabs their valuables and their battered PASIV out of the safe. When they'd first started working together, Kevin would unpack his clothes into the hotel drawers, folding them up with military precision. Neil, used to a life running from city to city and burning passports and IDs between each one, kept everything essential on him. They've both relaxed a bit in their separate ways, but it seems to have caught up with them anyway. One of Ichirou's men had simply turned up at the hotel after their previous job, requesting that they follow him.

Kevin won't tell Neil where they're going or who they're meeting up with. Not only does that set Neil's skin crawling – he knows Kevin won't contact anyone who's previously worked with his father but the paranoia is still there – but given that they're on their way and Neil is going to find out in a few hours anyway, he thinks it's unnecessarily dramatic. (Kevin thinks that since they're on their way and Neil is going to find out in a few hours anyway, it's just unnecessary.)

They take a flight out of New York, which takes two hours and twenty minutes, and is about two hours and ten minutes longer than Kevin needs to explain dreaming within a dream to Neil, after which they spend the time separately but similarly obsessing over Riko Moriyama.

When Kevin attempts to rent some flashy sports car at the airport, Neil pushes him out of the way. "I have no idea how you haven't attracted attention before this," says Neil, deadpan, wrangling him into a reasonably sized sedan instead.

Kevin drives like an absolute maniac, possibly because he is one, and they end up at a suspiciously normal looking house in a suburban area. Kevin opens the door up with a key, and Neil manages to wait until his back is turned to raise an eyebrow.

Inside is a man, short and blond, wearing all-black down to bands that wrap up his forearms. He takes the cigarette out from between his lips as his eyes flick from Kevin to Neil, back to Kevin, then once more across Neil, more thoroughly.

"I don't know you," he says.

"Neil," says Kevin with a quick dismissive gesture before leaving them to detour to the kitchen. "Andrew."

Neil blinks at the name; Andrew tilts his head, watching Neil's reaction with something akin to curiosity.

Andrew Minyard was Kevin's regular partner – before Neil. He's not as known in the dreamsharing community, because unlike Kevin he's never had an interest in cultivating his reputation. But everyone who knows Kevin knows: he only works with Andrew as Point Man.

Since they've been working together, Kevin's acted as point. He's very concerned with the small details and Neil generally likes to adapt to situations as they come up, which means that they haven't taken any overly complicated jobs. And if Kevin's previously been using levels of dreamsharing before, no wonder he'd needed a Point Man to keep track of everything.

"I thought you were out of the game," says Neil. He feels like he's being examined, and his ingrained reaction is to stand as still as possible.

"The game," says Andrew. His mouth lifts a little at the side, but Neil would be hard pressed to call it a smile. "It wouldn't be a game without a winner and a loser." He takes another drag of his cigarette instead of explaining, and lets the silence between them grow taut.

Kevin barrels out of the kitchen, holding a gently sagging carrot. "Is there a _single vegetable_ in this house?" he demands.

Andrew breaks eye contact with Neil, finally, and Neil blinks, finding his eyes watering with effort. "I believe you're holding it," drawls Andrew.

"And where's Nicky?" Kevin looks around, as if waiting for this Nicky person to magically appear.

"Germany," says Andrew.

"What," says Kevin. " _Why._ I need him."

Andrew shrugs, and starts walking away towards, presumably, the bedrooms. "I feel unspecial now."

Kevin pulls his phone out again, and starts angrily tapping at it. Neil takes a moment to reassure himself that breathing occasionally might be a good idea. He still stays frozen to his spot just inside the living room though.

"I thought Andrew didn't dreamshare anymore," says Neil, keeping his voice low.

Kevin looks up, distracted. "What makes you think that?"

"You weren't working together anymore."

"Andrew doesn't take jobs without me," says Kevin, and carries on typing. Neil nods like he understands, like he understands any of this, like he knows why Kevin has apparently brought him to his home, his place where he has a key and where he rummages through cupboards and where things belong to him. They're coworkers, and they might share their most private thoughts, but some things are off-limits, and this is sort of it.

"I didn't know that you and Andrew were partners."

Kevin looks up again, now annoyed that he keeps getting interrupted. "What? I'm sure you did. Before I got in touch with you."

Neil waits a moment. "Never mind," he says eventually.

There's the sound of a door opening, and soft footsteps. When Andrew reappears, Kevin's appeared to have finished texting, and Andrew drags a suitcase in behind him.

Andrew replaces Kevin in the driver's seat, despite the fact that he's not on the rental insurance. Kevin replaces Neil in the passenger's seat, and Neil slides into the middle of the back.

"This is a bit small," says Andrew, who had to move the seat all the way up to be able to reach the pedals. Kevin gives Neil an irritated look, and Neil studiously looks out of the window, and notices the sleek sports car in the drive.

They're ten minutes out from freeway towards West Virginia when Kevin says into the silence, "By the way. The job is inception. On Riko Moriyama."

Andrew swerves across two lanes of traffic. Neil clutches at his seat belt as it digs painfully into his gut; his heart rate rockets upwards and he scrabbles for his bag with one hand, for the gun he has stashed in the side pocket.

They skid to a stop amid a cacophony of car horns and tyre screeches as Andrew pulls them over on the side. Andrew's fingers are wrapped around the steering wheel so tightly that they're white.

"Get out," he tells Kevin. Kevin scrambles out of the car.


	3. Chapter 3

Kevin glares at Andrew as if Andrew pushed him out, even though he's the one who got out of the car just from being told to do so.

Andrew ignores him, and hits the gas. The car behind them honks furiously as Andrew accelerates. Left on the sidewalk, Kevin scowls after them.

"What the fuck," says Neil.

Andrew says nothing.

"What the _fuck_ ," says Neil, this time louder. Andrew gives no indication that he's heard Neil, but he does change lanes so that they're not headed for the freeway anymore. Neil pulls his bag onto his lap, hand loosely gripping the gun, other on the buckle of his seat belt, keeping one eye on a good place to drop and roll.

Andrew eventually pulls into a parking lot, one attached to some diner or restaurant called Sweetie's. He parks, and heads out, crooking one finger for Neil to follow. Neil follows, and brings his duffel bag with him.

It's pretty busy here, with clusters of teenagers out for the weekend and families relaxing with yawning children, but they get a booth pretty quickly nevertheless. Andrew doesn't take the menus offered by the waitress. "Just the ice cream special."

Neil shrugs when she looks at him expectantly, and she goes away again.

"So," says Andrew, and Neil is tugged sharply back to the present. To the fact that they just left _Kevin Day_ in the middle of the road and he is sharing a booth with one of the most infamous and yet unknown quantities in the dreamsharing world.

These are the things that Neil knows about Andrew Minyard:

  * He is the only point man that Kevin Day will work with
  * He was invited to participate in the military-funded research program that Kevin had been a part of, and turned it down



And he assumes, given the previous two points:

  * He is very good at what he does



It's not a long list. Looking at the man across from him, Neil can understand why; Andrew is looking back at him, waiting with narrowed eyes, and Neil can't read him at all. Neil prides himself on being able to read people, especially since he adds them to his repertoire of characters he can pull on over his skin and impersonate, and Andrew makes him uncomfortable. It's the sort of tension that has his skin crawling with anticipation because he's just waiting for something to go wrong but he doesn't know what. Well, more wrong than driving off without Kevin.

"Explain," says Andrew.

"I'm pretty sure you need to explain," says Neil. "You just ditched Kevin!"

"Inception," says Andrew, as if Neil hadn't spoken at all. "Riko Moriyama."

Neil grits his teeth. "Yes, that's it. You didn't hear wrong."

"Something made Kevin say yes."

Andrew, Neil is noticing, doesn't ask questions like a normal person. He makes demands or statements instead, but he's not incorrect. If it had been a random client asking for that, Kevin would have just turned down the job and moved on.

"The client is Ichirou Moriyama," he says. He doesn't know how much Andrew knows about Kevin's movements and the jobs they've been taking together, but he can assume that Andrew knows who the rest of the Moriyama family are.

"Family squabbles."

"Influential family squabbles. He didn't get in touch with us and ask for a meeting; he tracked us down and was waiting for us at our hotel as we finished our last job. I don't want to be looking over my shoulder for him for the rest of my life for turning him down."

Andrew drums his fingers across the tabletop. "Not my problem what you do with your life."

"It's your problem what Kevin does, and he's the one Ichirou really wants," says Neil. He wants to reach across the table and smack his hand over Andrew's fingers to stop the drumming.

The waitress arrives with the ice cream special and two spoons. Andrew takes both, and pulls the ice cream pointedly towards himself.

Neil waits until the waitress is out of earshot again. "He wants Riko to try and usurp him."

"Predictable."

"Kevin said he's done it before."

Andrew wags one finger in the air. "It's been _tried_ before. It didn't take."

"Why?"

"He wasn't good enough."

"What do you mean?" But now Neil's answered his questions, Andrew doesn't seem inclined to talk anymore; he gazes out of the window and eats his heap of ice cream instead.

"What happened on that job?" tries Neil again. He can feel his temper eroding. "And why would he say it's been done before if it hasn't?" Each of his questions is met with indifference.

Eventually, Andrew wipes his mouth, leaves some cash, and walks out. Neil slides out after him, still fuming.

Andrew slides into the car and lights up a cigarette. Neil's pretty sure their rental policy doesn't allow that either.

"That's it, then?" Neil goes around for the passenger side door. "You wanted some answers to your questions? Why didn't you ask Kevin?"

"I didn't need to ask Kevin. You had all the answers I needed."

Neil slides into the seat, and freezes. Neil's bag is open in Andrew's lap. The cigarette dangles out between Andrew's lips as he shuffles through the dossier Ichirou had passed them. Except – it's not the information that Inchirou had included, it's other things. _Personal_ things.

"Where did you get that?" asks Neil. He always keeps that bag on him. How could he have forgotten it? He'd taken it into the restaurant with him, but... Had he forgotten to bring it back out again? But he hadn't seen Andrew holding it when they'd walked back to the car. Which means... which means...

"We're in a dream."

The sky turns grey, and there's the screech of a car crash as Neil's mind finally realises.

"You're very slow," remarks Andrew. He shuffles the papers back in order, and zips them back into the bag. Even though it's not his actual bag, Neil's stomach heaves at the mere idea of someone rummaging through his things. No, this is worse. Andrew just rummaged through his mind and Neil just... Neil just let him.

Neil's mind is militarised; this shouldn't have happened. There's the sound of a fight from inside the restaurant, and patrons start marching out of the restaurant, looking for the blip in the mental landscape, which is what _should_ have happened at the start of the dream. People are starting to converge on their rental car as Neil watches Andrew zip the bag up and give it back to him as if he didn't just pillage Neil's head for anything he wanted to know.

"Let's go," says Andrew, as if they are just in a car, and not in a dream suddenly faced with Neil's screaming subconscious. He's suddenly holding a gun and raises it to Neil's head.

At least he's a good shot.


	4. Chapter 4

Neil wakes up in the back seat of the car. He starts to sit up, pulling his legs from under where the front seat, with Andrew on, is reclined all the way back. He looks out of the window. He remembers now – Andrew had pulled them in round the back of an abandoned building and pulled a battered, early-model PASIV out from his suitcase, saying that he wanted to see what Neil could do.

In the front seat, Andrew is similarly waking up, rolling away his tubing with the same impassive look across his face he had in the dream. One look at that face and Neil is absolutely fucking furious all over again.

He waits until Andrew's done, and then pulls out the needle from his arm and puts it away carefully too. He's not going to take it out on the equipment, which is rare and expensive on the black market, not to mention difficult to maintain and repair and, of course, highly illegal, but once the PASIV is tucked under the passenger seat, Neil leans across the car and grabs the front of Andrew's t-shirt, hauling him in.

"Don't ever fucking do that again," says Neil, shaking with rage. He doesn't even know what it was Andrew extracted out of him, which is what terrifies him the most. That Andrew did it so casually and effortlessly is insane. Neil's never met anyone so good, apart from Kevin, and Kevin's never tried to do it _on him_.

"Or what?" asks Andrew. He wraps his hands around Neil's wrists, and tightens. Neil hisses with pain; Andrew's grip is vice-like, the muscles in his forearms tightening, and he shows no discomfort at being dragged half out of the front seat. "You'll shoot me? Don't make empty threats."

Neil wonders when Andrew realised he had a gun in his bag. He hadn't brought it out when he'd had that altercation with Kevin earlier, but maybe it had been just a good guess. A lot of people in the industry carry guns.

He lets go, dropping Andrew back onto the seat. He's tired. Tired of the constant running, the looking over his shoulder, the lack of sleep and the justified paranoia. Setting up shop with Kevin was meant to be a way of getting past that, of establishing a new identity for himself. He doesn't want to go back to being constantly on the watch for a knife in the back, and definitely not from someone he's supposed to be working with.

"Don't fuck with my head again," says Neil. He flexes his wrists, where white and red stripes are imprinted where Andrew's fingers were.

Andrew watches him, not missing a detail, before turning the ignition. Neil does up his seatbelt as Andrew drives them back onto the road, and surreptitiously nudges his bag with his foot to check his things are still inside.

They drive past Sweetie's – a real restaurant then. Neil peers inside, wondering if it means that Andrew used a memory for the dream. It's one of the first things he was taught, never to use a memory. It's too easy to forget and lose himself when dreams are constructed from memories and spend their time in dreamsharing reliving a memory over and over; there are tales of people who wake up when the dregs of Somnacin wash out of their veins and are confused as to what is reality.

Neil stays on the edge of his seat with his hand on the buckle and ready to roll out if Andrew tries anything all the way, but Andrew just drives them back the way they came. Neil's stomach drops in relief when he sees Kevin come into view. He's standing exactly where they left him, his arms crossed and a scowl on his face. Neil wonders if he's been standing just like that for however long Andrew whisked him away for, secure in the knowledge that Andrew would come back from him at some point. That's pretty impressive.

Andrew skids to a stop next to Kevin, who leans down to scowl at them even more. Neil's vaguely glad that he's not the only one Kevin scowls at. Andrew leans over to open the passenger door as explicit permission to enter.

"Finally," Kevin huffs.

As he leans down, Andrew grabs the front of his shirt; Kevin falls forward, bracing one knee against the seat, and goes very still. Andrew gets his face up in Kevin's, straining against the seatbelt to do so. "You are making this very difficult for me," says Andrew.

"I know," says Kevin, and swallows whatever else he's about to say.

There's a terse moment as they have some sort of silent conversation, punctuated by side flicks of their eyes towards Neil. Neil pretends he isn't there.

Andrew lets go, and Kevin awkwardly folds him properly into the seat. They resume on their way towards the freeway as if the last half hour or however much time Andrew spent picking through Neil's head never happened.

Once they make it onto the freeway, Kevin asks suddenly, "What do you think?"

Neil jumps a little. He's about to ask what on earth Kevin's talking about, when Andrew answers. "He's dead weight."

"How long?"

"Didn't even notice until I pointed it out."

"I'm _right here_ ," says Neil. He's got the sense that they're talking about him, and his time under with Andrew – what he doesn't get is how they're managing to have any sort of meaningful conversation when they're only using the minimal number of words to qualify as a sentence half the time, except they seem to be understanding each other perfectly fine.

Kevin turns, looks at Neil, and frowns disappointedly. Neil has, frankly, no idea what's going on, but feels himself being judged anyway. "You didn't show him _anything_?"

"I didn't know there was anything to show," snaps Neil, reining himself in from punching the back of Kevin's seat. "Was this a test all along? I've been working with you for almost a year and I've been doing pretty well."

"He's a forger," says Kevin, speaking to Andrew now.

"So you've said. Repeatedly."

Wait, what? Neil blinks. That means that Kevin's spoken about him before to Andrew. Repeatedly. But Neil knows that when Kevin called, all he said was that he needed Andrew and was coming to get him, so this must have been before. Kevin hasn't mentioned Andrew once in the last twelve months; Neil reels, struggling to wrap his head around their relationship.

"He's militarised," says Kevin, his voice getting louder with his agitation.

"Didn't seem it."

Kevin turns back to look at Neil again, and just looks at him again for a very long moment.

" _What_ ," says Neil.

"You didn't react?"

It's been bothering Neil too. The only way to survive in this industry is to train his mind to react to even the slightest of clues that he's in a dream and to converge on the anomaly as soon as possible. He hasn't had formal training like Kevin has with the military training project he started from, but his mother would drag him into random dreams and force him to produce defences, in the form of projections and mazes and unbreachable safe spots.

"No. I don't know why, but my mind didn't register the intrusion. I'll need to shore up my defences once we get there."

To his surprise, Kevin just nods in satisfaction. That's very unlike Kevin. Even when a job goes well, Kevin rarely reacts positively, instead talking about covering their tracks or moving to their next location or lying low for a while. Kevin's never satisfied, and especially not with Neil. Something niggles in the back of his head.

"So suspicious," says Andrew, breaking into Neil's train of thought. Neil looks up, and sees Andrew's eyes meet his in the rear view mirror.

"Everyone in dreamsharing is suspicious," says Neil, well aware that he is deflecting. He holds Andrew's gaze anyway. He's not sure how long they lock eyes for, but it definitely cannot be a safe amount of time for Andrew to be looking away from the road.

He makes himself look out of the window, rubbing at his eyes. They're dry from the staring, and they're always itchy after he comes out of a dream anyway, because his contacts start to dry out. Except, he realises halfway through, that he's not wearing his contacts.

He blinks, rubs his eyes again to check. But no, they're definitely not there. He doesn't think they've fallen out into the car. He looks back at the mirror again; Andrew's eyes flick up to meet him – there's some sort of emotion there but he can't figure out what.

Neil's heart speeds up until he can hear the pounding in his head. He clenches the shoulder of Kevin's seat so hard he feels his fingernails stretch the fabric.

"Levels," says Neil, struggling to keep calm. His voice comes out as a croak. He _remembers_ now. " _Levels._ "

He's still in a dream.

Kevin looks back at him, triumphant. Neil scrabbles for the gun in his bag, wrestling with the zip, but he doesn't need it now. He wants a gun and his mind provides; one appears in his hand. He raises it, and his only hesitation is because he can't decide which of these fuckers he wants to shoot first.

"Don't be childish," says Kevin, which very nearly makes Neil empty the entire cartridge into his smug fucking face. "You wanted to know what dreaming within a dream meant."

"I – you already told me! Hours ago!"

"It is not the same." Kevin waves a hand around him, as if to say _See?_ Neil grits his teeth, if only because Kevin is right. It's much easier to lose himself after one layer, to forget that he's dreaming. They have their own mix of Somnacin too, he remembers Kevin mentioning it top-side now, because it has a mild sedative to encourage stability in the lower layers.

Now Neil's figured it out, it feels obvious. The freeway is practically deserted, the road now a bridge that realigns itself with however Andrew drives. No wonder he doesn't need to keep his eyes on the road.

No wonder Andrew called him slow; Andrew had known all along it had been a dream within a dream, he hadn't lost himself in it at all. And Neil's the one with the foolproof method of knowing.

He checks, anyway. He holds his hands up in front of his face. In the space between one breath and the next, his nails have shrivelled and grown yellow. The knuckles are knobbly and wrinkles line the back of his hands. Neil breathes easier.

Neil's always had the ability to do this in dreams. They call him a forger, because he can change his appearance at will when he's inside a dream, and he can pose as someone the mark knows or trusts to stay hidden for longer. Even when he first manifests inside a dream, he has brown hair and brown eyes to match his dyed hair and contact lenses in the real world, which is why he doesn't have contact lenses in at the moment: his eyes are actually brown. As long as Neil can change his appearance, he knows he's still in a dream. It looks like he's going to have to check a lot more often now.

"Curiouser and curiouser," says Andrew, and Neil looks up to find him watching in the rearview mirror again.

"Not completely dead weight?" asks Neil dryly, turning his hands back into his own.

In lieu of answering, Andrew smiles that not-smile of his again, and jerks the wheel, sending them careening towards the side of the freeway as he accelerates. Neil screams as they hit the barrier at speed and flip over the edge of the bridge; the sensation of falling rushes through his gut and –

  
He wakes up in the house in Columbia, lying on the floor next to Kevin and Andrew. This time, he checks his hands.


	5. Chapter 5

They finally make it out to West Virginia, where Riko is based. Kevin rents them a gutted old factory, using a fake ID and a truly hideous Boston accent, and Neil rents them another inconspicuous sedan that doesn't meet either Kevin or Andrew's expectations. Andrew buys more cigarettes.

Neil gets to see the Dream Team in action. It is a little grating, since he and Kevin have just started to figure out the best way for them to work together and now he has to readjust to a whole new set of unknown parameters, but honestly watching Kevin and Andrew work together is a learning experience all by itself.

Kevin pores over the notes Ichirou gave them, adding reams of his own. Andrew glances over each of them exactly once. Kevin has all sorts of ideas for each level, from the kind of complexity the maze will need to size of the dreamscape. He knows Riko from their Project Sandman days and knows how Riko's mind is militarised; he hasn't had a run-in with him in years so his information might be outdated, but it's still better than nothing. He sets up a large whiteboard and scrawls illegible brainstorms across it. Andrew follows behind with a whiteboard eraser and liberally rubs swathes of it out.

They don't actually, as far as Neil can tell, talk to each other very much.

Kevin, it appears, is absolutely shit at drawing, including technical drawing, which would explain why he and Neil have been working easy jobs so far and Neil has been the dreamer most of the time, because trying to recreate what Kevin is trying to draw on paper in a dream would be impossible.

"It's a trap," says Kevin, pointing at a scribble.

"It's shit," says Neil. He's trying to salvage the paper that they're drawing ideas for levels on, because Kevin keeps stabbing at it too hard with a pen and leaving little puncture holes.

In the corner, Andrew laughs delightedly, even more so when Kevin and Neil both turn to scowl at him. There's something about Andrew that unsettles him. Sometimes he's intensely focussed, pointing out any small detail that Kevin overlooks, much to Kevin's annoyance, and at other times he can barely deign to sit in the same room as them, staring off into the distance as he smokes.

"Now I know how you stuck with him for so long," says Andrew, and Neil wonders if he was talking to him or to Kevin, but Andrew's looking out of the window again.

He tries to bring it up with Kevin, after they leave the warehouse and go grocery shopping. Kevin likes to pick up fresh veg and fruit, occasionally muttering about ‘superfoods'. Neil leans towards things that can be eaten cold, or only require microwaving. Andrew's buying more cigarettes, and being carded for it.

Neil watches him, three aisles away, and turns to Kevin. "Why did you stop working with Andrew?"

"I didn't. We're working together now." Kevin Day, forefront pioneer of dreamsharing, master extractor who has stolen countless secrets from people's minds, has a shit poker face. Neil is pretty sure half of his energy goes into trying not to grab Kevin's collar and shake some half-decent answers out of him.

"Why did you start working with me?" Neil is going to keep digging at this from different angles until he knows what he's getting into.

Kevin looks over two cucumbers, both of which look perfectly cucumber-shaped to Neil, and eventually says, "Because you could be good at what you do." The implication being, of course, that Neil is not actually good at the moment. Which, okay, stings, and is also not the point of this questioning, so he files it away to be compartmented and processed later.

"Why didn't you bring Andrew on your jobs with me?"

"He didn't feel like coming."

"Why not?"

"Ask him."

"Kevin."

Kevin puts both cucumbers back, and picks up another two. Neil is going to snap in a moment.

"Kevin. He already raided my head once. I'm not working with him until I know I don't have to spend all of my time constantly militarising myself. Do you trust him?"

"Of course," says Kevin, the words spilling out despite his attempt at ignoring Neil. Somehow, Kevin's immediate response is actually reassuring.

"So tell me. Is it going to affect the job?"

"It shouldn't," says Kevin, who has no room to talk because Neil has been bludgeoned to death by Kevin's projection of Riko a few times now. "But perhaps."

Neil looks over at Andrew. He's got his cigarettes now, and is stacking his trolley full of alcohol. He turns, almost as if he can sense Neil looking at him, and Neil looks away before they make eye contact.

A thought forms in his head, almost as if someone has just planted it there, and Neil checks his hands. No wrinkles; not a dream. Neil did not make it this far in this industry by himself without trusting his instincts.

"Kevin," he says urgently, before Andrew can get to them. "Kevin. Why do you think we'll be able to perform Inception?"

"It's been done before," says Kevin, which is what he said last time Neil asked.

"Andrew said it failed."

Kevin looks at Neil, his eyes wide and shocked as if he's figured out the conclusion that Neil's coming to. "Andrew thinks it did."

"Who did you perform Inception on?" asks Neil, and even though he thinks he's figured it out, it's still like a punch in the stomach when Kevin says:

"Andrew."

–

The next day, Neil is dispatched to go pick up Nicky, who is apparently Andrew's cousin, and who moved to Germany some time in the last year. Neil feels vaguely like a kid being sent out on an errand so the parents can get some real work done, but he only puts up a nominal fight about how it makes least sense for him to go, seeing as he's the only one who's never met Nicky.

Being away from the warehouse is like a breath of fresh air.

The drive doesn't give Neil any more answers, no matter how much his brain scrabbles around to try and understand what Kevin had told him the day before, but it's still good to be away from Kevin and Andrew, if only for a while. Kevin had clammed up after his awful confession, and Andrew had rolled into their aisle with half a dozen bottles of expensive whiskey. Once they got back, Kevin had avoided Neil, slipping into the room he's sharing with Andrew, and Neil had been left with only his overactive imagination instead. Eighteen hours later, and he's still no closer to the truth. He's almost contemplating infiltrating Kevin's mind like Andrew did with him, except there's no way that he'd be able to extract from Kevin without being torn to shreds.

The airport is full of strangers, and Neil relishes the anonymity.

Nicky, when he arrives, is loud and cheerful and nothing like Andrew. He comes armed with a huge amount of luggage, half of which appears to be strapped together flatpack cardboard boxes. He and Neil tetris it all into the car, and on the way to the warehouse, he tells Neil about his husband, Erik, who is apparently a completely normal person who works and lives in Germany, and not an international mind thief. Nicky spends about ten minutes talking about how cute their combined genetics will make their babies.

It's incredibly surreal. Neil had almost forgotten what it's like to work with other people, people who are less... well, like Kevin.

Once they get to the warehouse, Kevin comes out to meet them. "Is Erik real?" asks Neil in an aside.

"What?" asks Kevin.

"Erik Klose. Is he a real person, or did you – on him too?" Neil makes a vague hand motion near his head.

Kevin frowns, ever so slightly. "Yes, he's very real. I don't perform inception on everyone I know."

"Huh," says Neil, and goes back to watching Nicky attempting wrestle large bits of cardboard and polystyrene out of the car without offering to help.

Nicky is their architect. Which is, honestly, a relief.

"What is this shit," Nicky says with dismay, rifling through Kevin's pile of drawings. "I taught you better than this." He brings out notepads with square and triangle paper, a tablet and some computer software that allows him to render mazes with ease.

"If I could do it myself, I wouldn't need you," says Kevin sharply. He's sulking near his whiteboard.

"True," agrees Nicky, as he starts to make notes. "Are you going to be a dreamer?"

"Me and Neil. We'll need a third. Boyd, maybe."

Nicky flicks a look at Andrew, who doesn't even deign to look at him. They're not _close_ cousins then. "You're going to have three levels in the dream? Have you tried it out yet?"

Kevin also looks at Andrew, though his look is annoyed. "No. As I said, we need a third dreamer. I'll dream the second level, Neil will dream the third. We just need someone to control the first."

Neil looks over sharply. The PASIV machine allows shared dreaming, so everyone who takes the Somnacin and plugs themselves in can join in, but one person still needs to host the dream – that person is called the dreamer, and they construct the surroundings that everyone else falls into.

Nicky will be in charge of designing the dreams, creating mazes with built in traps, so that they can protect themselves from Riko's projections. The more complex the maze, the harder it is to keep it stable, but also the longer it will take for the projections to work out how to get to them. That bit is simple enough.

The problem is that whoever is dreaming one level can't go down with the others into the next, as they need to concentrate on maintaining the construction of the surroundings so that the dream doesn't collapse. Neil had assumed that he would dream and Kevin would take Riko down into another dream and do his Inception thing as Neil kept things running one level up. But if Kevin's dreaming the second level, that means that he intends for Neil to go down into the third level with Riko without him.

"I can't." Neil is not remotely good enough to do that.

Kevin waves his hand impatiently. "You'll learn."

"It's Riko. His subconscious is not going to fall for anything but the best."

"Then you will have to be the best," says Kevin, annoyed that they're still talking about it.

Nicky watches them go back and forth with interest. "So, Neil will dream the third level. Kevin the second. Matt Boyd for the first? He can handle a big maze, that's good. He'll need to fend them off for the longest. I'll assume you don't want to know the constructs of that then."

Kevin nods.

"We'll get Boyd," says Andrew, which is the first time today he's spoken without being asked a direct question. He crooks a finger at Neil, who finds himself following Andrew before he's even really thought about it.

They set off, in silence apart from the GPS occasionally chirping instructions at them. Neil wonders why it takes two of them to go pick up Boyd, but Andrew still doesn't seem inclined to talk.

The silence is tense, until Neil realises that it's tense because he thinks it's tense. He rolls the window down an inch or two. Breathes. Gazes out of the window, watching the people in the other cars. He tries to do that as often as possible, picking up personalities and habits he can use in dreams. He doesn't even know who he'll be impersonating in this job, or if he'll be forging at all.

Boyd is in some place called Palmetto, according to Kevin's data. Andrew stops for snacks and a toilet break, and they arrive in time to duck into a drive-through for greasy fast food. The place they end up at is a condemned building, with do not enter tape draped across the gateway. It looks like it's been in a fire, with parts of the second floor caved in.

Neil is frowning and double checking the address when Andrew elbows him. He jerks his chin toward the door, and Neil follows his line of sight until he spots it. A single CCTV camera lurks outside the door, the red light blinking every so often.

Andrew parks the car just outside and they duck under the tape. "Charming," says Andrew, his voice startlingly loud in the dimming light.

Neil reaches the front door. Now he's this close, he can tell that the door's been replaced. It's solid metal, sealed and flat in line with the frame so that it would be impossible to pry open, and there's no handle on the front. He looks up at the CCTV camera. The door clicks open by itself.

"I think I've seen this movie," remarks Andrew brightly. Neil does a double take; Andrew is smiling. It's unsettling.

"What?"

"Stereotypical horror movie beginning," says Andrew. "You first."

Neil frowns, still not understanding – he watches movies if they're relevant for a job, such as if a mark is particularly obsessed with one and they can recreate it in a dream, but he doesn't watch them just for fun – but he walks in first anyway.

It becomes quickly apparent that the derelict building is just for show. The entrance hall that must have originally been there has been converted into a short corridor that turns into a set of stairs that lead downwards.

Neil stares down into the darkness, and jumps when a light clicks on at the bottom, completely ruining his acclimatising night vision. There's a woman standing at the bottom with a gun pointed at him.

She stares him down for a moment, and then her eyes slide past. "Minyard."

"Wilds."


	6. Chapter 6

"Kevin said you might be visiting." The gun doesn't waver. "He didn't mention that you'd have company."

"Kevin didn't mention _you_ at all," says Andrew carelessly, pushing past Neil and walking down the stairs towards her.

"Matt and I run this place together."

"A dream den," says Andrew, and his tone is emotionless.

"More than that," says Dan. Her lips press together; she doesn't like Andrew, but clearly knows him enough to have let them in. Neil doesn't know what a dream den is, though he has an inkling from the name, but follows Andrew down the stairs anyway.

"Dan Wilds," says the woman, once he reaches the bottom.

"Neil Josten," says Neil. She clicks the safety on and puts the gun away, offering him a hand to shake. He's vaguely heard of her; the dreamsharing community is small and reputations get around, people letting each other know who's good to work with.

"Kevin's partners," she says after a moment's pause, looking back and forth between Neil and Andrew. "That's interesting."

Neil wonders what she's heard about him, but files it away to ask later, if he gets the chance without Andrew hanging around. He's been hoping that working with Kevin has raised his profile, so it's a good sign that she recognised his name. He shelves that thought as Dan takes them through the door, which is more reinforced metal with no handle. Surprisingly, the other side of the basement looks like a nice hotel lobby, if said hotel was underground. There's a reception desk and a cloakroom, there's red carpet that squishes under his battered shoes, there's a little sofa with a coffee table, and a framed print on the wall. The only thing missing is a window.

"Hey," says the man sitting behind the counter. He waves at them. "You found it okay then?"

"Evidently," says Andrew.

"Hi, I'm Matt Boyd," says Matt, standing to greet Neil. He looms over everyone else in the room from sheer height, but his effortless affability means it doesn't make Neil automatically back up.

"Neil Josten," says Neil. "Did Kevin explain why we're here?"

Dan snorts, and Matt grins indulgently at her. "Kevin doesn't exactly explain anything, ever."

Neil will give them that.

"And he didn't exactly give us a chance to explain either," says Matt. "If he wants expertise about the mechanics or construction of the dream den, then I'm happy to help."

"What is a dream den?" asks Neil.

Matt points a thumb over his shoulder, at the other door. "I'll show you."

The room beyond reception does not look like a hotel. Instead, they've converted the whole of the basement into one open plan room that spans for yards and yards. There are narrow beds in rows and clusters, all filled with bodies.

It takes a moment for Neil to process what his eyes can see, slowly taking in more and more details. Everyone in a bed is hooked up to what looks like an IV drip at first, but Neil follows the tubing upwards to see a web latticed across the ceiling and hooked up to an oversized PASIV mounted up there.

"We work with people with all sorts of complicated relationships with dreaming," says Dan, watching Neil look around.

"Complicated relationships," says the Matt, chuckling. "That's one way of putting it."

"They're all sharing one dream?" Neil asks incredulously. He'd been thinking that their expanding team of four or five was already going to be difficult to handle the logistics of. His eyes start to skim over the number of beds there are crammed into the basement. "How many of them are there?"

"Fifty two at the moment," says Dan. Among the sleepers are several people watching over them, checking vital signs and wiping them down with wet cloths.

"How long is the dream?"

"It's continuous."

Neil turns to look at her. He doesn't understand; a controlled Somnacin dosage would allow someone to control how long they can share a dream for, but in the end it's still sleep. At some point, the human body realises that it doesn't need to continue sleeping, and will wake up.

"We use a sedative to keep people asleep for as long as they request. Most of our sleepers don't wake up," says Dan gently.

Neil looks closer, and sees the atrophied muscles peeking out from under blankets, and the extra tubes, ones that aren't for Somnacin but are for nutrition and waste disposal. It's a room of deliberate coma patients.

He doesn't ask who would choose a life like this, or why. He knows why. He's considered never waking up from a good dream before, and making the dream his reality, and in the end it was spite that made him come back to reality.

He looks over at Andrew, who locks eyes with him. Neil still can't read him, but he gets the impression that Andrew is also the sort of person who could never live his life out in a dream.

"Who's hosting the dream?"

"No one," says Matt, leading them through the room. "They're all in limbo. It's like... it's like a video game, an MMO. They're all in a shared dream, but they have the ability to interact or silo themselves as much as they want and carve out their own dream world."

Neil doesn't fully understand limbo, but Kevin's mentioned it before. As far as he knows, it's unmapped dream space where anyone can alter their surroundings, not just the designated dreamer. He's never been down there; when he dies in a dream, he just gets kicked out of it, waking up in reality. It must be because of the sedation that keeps them forcibly asleep, which is worrying because it means that limbo is a possibility whenever they're doing levels.

Andrew wanders away from the group, ghosting in and out among the sleepers as he looks them over. Neil watches him, and says dryly, "Yeah, I think your expertise of massive multiplayer dreamsharing might come in handy with what we're planning."

"That's not what you were here to ask?" asks Matt, eyebrows raising in confusion.

"No. Kevin wants you to be the dreamer on a job we've got planned."

Matt smiles apologetically. "Ah. I don't dream anymore. Bad batch of Somnacin. I'd have explained if Kevin had told me more than just to expect you guys." He turns his arms towards Neil, showing the track marks on the inside of his elbows. The veins on both arms have collapsed, and there's puckered scarring that snakes both up to his biceps and down to his forearms that looks like someone injected him with acid. Neil winces.

"It's fine. We'll find someone else."

"What's the job?" asks Dan.

"Can't tell you unless you're on it," says Neil cautiously. "But it's dangerous, stupidly complicated and has a high chance of failure. But it will be very well paid."

Dan and Matt exchange a look, and a bit of a grin that makes Neil think better of them. "Well, I can do it," says Dan. "Unless you're after something that only Matt can do. Matt can still do the topside work."

Andrew's circled back to them now. Neil looks at him for a cue, since he has no idea what Dan is like in a dream. Andrew shrugs, but there's a glint in his eye. "Let's see what you can do, and then we'll see."

Neil's stomach plummets.

"Like an audition? Fair enough," says Dan, oblivious to Neil mentally wishing she'd decline. He doesn't want to be complicit in this.

"You don't need one of you to stay here?" asks Neil.

Dan shakes her head. "Actually, we prefer to stay active on jobs to fund it, but we have a rota of volunteers. Mostly family of the sleepers."

Neil looks at the caregivers dotted here and there, and starts noticing some family resemblances to the sleepers they're watching over, and shudders.

They go to a cosy flat a few blocks away from the dream den while Matt stays behind to organise coverage if they are going to be away for a while. There's a smattering on knick-knacks across the shelves and tables, looking cheery and lived in and too intimate. Neil has safe houses and stashes, but none of them look like this. He sinks gingerly into one side of the sofa that Dan waves them into as she goes to grab their normal PASIV. Andrew, instead of sitting on the opposite end of the sofa or in an armchair like anyone else would do, sits in the middle of the sofa, his leg pressing against Neil's.

Neil scowls at him. "Seriously?"

"So touchy," says Andrew, who's been in his scarily happy mode since suggesting that Dan go under with them. "Don't you trust me?"

"About as far as I can throw you," mutters Neil.

Andrew bares his teeth at Neil. "Weakling."

Neil's leg starts drumming, and Andrew catches hold of his knee, stilling it. "Don't worry," says Andrew brightly. "I have no intention of repeating what we did with you. You were just special."

Neil regards him with suspicion, and because he doesn't know what else to say, says, "Good."

"She's not a threat," he carries on dismissively. "But you. You, Nathaniel. You are a threat." He's still smiling as he says the words, and Neil feels shivers down his spine.

"Don't call me that."

Andrew leans into Neil's personal space, staring him dead in the eyes. "Give me a reason not to."

Neil hears Dan's footsteps then, and when she reaches the living room, she finds them still like that, Andrew's head close to Neil's. Andrew pulls away first, but only because Neil's frozen.

True to his word, Andrew doesn't do what he did to Neil. Instead, he chooses to be the sleeper, and tells Dan to give them the biggest, most complicated maze she can sustain, and see how long she can last against Andrew's head.

Dan picks a city as her maze, which is a good idea since it's effortlessly bigger than a hotel or another setting constrained within one building. Neil picks out a number of influences from New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, even Toronto, and admires the way she blends it all together.

Andrew's mind is as terrifying as Neil thought it would be. It's not like Ichirou's, whose subconscious tracked the intruders down with single-minded efficiency and ruthless, it's more that his entire mind is suspicious of everything, regardless of whether Dan's making any changes to it or not, and the projections are violent towards anything and everything, including other projections.

Neil's a tourist on this trip, which means that while Dan tries to survive against Andrew's mind, Neil gets to explore and see how structurally good her worldbuilding is. She's got a good grasp on focussing on the bigger picture, the constructions, and letting the dreamer fill in the details.

Most of the writing on the street signs is gibberish, and half of the office blocks don't actually have doors. Neil ducks down an alley, slowly changing small details about himself until his hair is dark and shaggy, he's stockier and his face is square. He changes the rhythm of his walking until he lopes down the street. He sees a sign, and turns on a whim.

He finds Andrew drinking in a whiskey bar. The other patrons -- projections -- turn and glare at him when he enters.

"Hello Nathaniel," says Andrew, holding up his whiskey and squinting at it. "Can you get drunk on dream whiskey if you already know it's a dream?"

"Don't call me that," says Neil, again, through altered vocal chords.

Andrew hums, which is not acquiescence. "I will consider it," he says carefully. "If you show me what you really look like."

"You will consider it, and decide that you will stop it, and I will show you," says Neil flatly, because he's not stupid.

Andrew swivels around in his barstool to look at him. "You drive a hard bargain, Mr Wesninski." Neil flinches, and Andrew watches him do it with morbid interest. "Agreed."

That was too easy. Neil scowls, wondering what it is he's missed, but, well, Andrew's already agreed. His hair turns auburn, and his skin turns paler. There are scars underneath his t-shirt, but those are hidden. He doesn't see his eyes turn blue, but he knows that they've changed when Andrew looks into them.

Once Neil unforges himself, Andrew's projections lose interest in him, going back to their cocktails and spirits, which is unnerving in itself.

Somewhere to Neil's right, there's a rumble in the ground that spreads quickly towards them. "Looks like I've found her," says Andrew, watching dispassionately as cracks appear in the ground. Neil lets the dream crumble beneath his feet, and falls into wakefulness.

Andrew is reaching for a cigarette when Neil sits up. "You'll do," he tells Dan, and heads out the door, already clicking his lighter.

Dan packs light, which Neil approves of. Matt brings spare parts and modifications for the PASIV, and a toolkit, which Neil also approves of. He wonders if Matt would be amenable to tuning up the battered first generation monstrosity that he's got in his bag. It's been unused since he took up with Kevin, as Kevin's model is better, but he keeps it anyway, for the inevitable time when Kevin will ditch him.

On the way back, Neil updates Kevin on the situation via text, not really wanting to deal with his unfiltered reaction on the phone. Kevin is, understandably, annoyed, and it shows when he starts misspelling things in his haste to let Neil know just how annoyed he is.

 _They're both in the car and they know what the job is. Unless you want to kill them over this_ , types Neil when Kevin says that they should look for someone else instead. _Andrew approved it_.

That shuts Kevin up, almost.

_They onlu get one share we dont need two people to do one persons job_

Neil sighs, and swivels around to let them know Kevin's demands. They're not too bothered about splitting one share between the two of them - half of a multi-million dollar payout is still a multi-million dollar payout, after all - and after that, it seems that Kevin's run out of things to bitch about.

It's past midnight by the time they get back to West Virginia. They leave Dan and Matt to sort themselves out at the hotel lobby, and head on up to their rooms. Andrew and Kevin are sharing one and Neil had been by himself but will be with Nicky now. It puts him on edge, sharing a room with someone he doesn't really know; he and Kevin had done it for safety, so one of them could reach for a weapon if the other one was attacked, but Nicky seems to think that sharing a room means being social with each other.

Nicky asks about the car journey; Neil tells him it was fine. Nicky asks about Dan and Matt; Neil shrugs and tells him it was fine. By the time Nicky asks him how he's doing, Neil's finally realised that this is small talk, not an important business conversation, and heads to the bathroom to get ready for bed.

Someone knocks on the door, and Neil doubles back for his gun before looking through the peephole, twisting his body to minimise the chance of getting shot through the door. It turns out it's Andrew, but to be fair, that doesn't discount the possibility that Neil will get shot.

Neil opens the door, and Andrew shoulders past him, surprisingly solid for a guy his size, and Neil rubs his ribcage. Andrew plants himself in front of Nicky, and his voice comes out as a growl.

"Where is Kevin?"


	7. Chapter 7

Nicky holds his hands into the air. “Whoa, chill,” he says. “He’s back at the factory. He said he wanted to work on the dreams some more by himself.”

Neil sees Andrew’s eyes narrow as he says, “Kevin doesn’t go under by himself.”

“Kevin says the same thing about you,” says Neil. “And besides, he does. Occasionally, anyway. I’ve seen it.”

The thing with Neil is, he can tell that they’re the wrong words even as he’s saying them, but that in no way stops him from actually saying them. Andrew swivels towards him slowly, like a hound catching the scent of a fox.

“How occasionally?” asks Andrew.

Neil thinks about it for a while. Kevin’s always been obsessed with dreamsharing, perhaps rightly so because he’s so good at it and he was involved in exploring the possibilities it afforded when the technology first developed, and it’s true that every so often, between jobs, Kevin would use the PASIV. It never seemed weird to Neil, because it made sense that Kevin was the best because he practiced more than anyone else, and it was never any of his business what Kevin did in his spare time anyway.

“Maybe once a month or so. More, recently.”

Andrew heads straight for the door, and Neil goes after him. Andrew doesn’t stop or slow. “And where do you think you’re going?”

“You look like you need help,” deadpans Neil.

Andrew tsks. He’s really good at making Neil feel completely inadequate with no words at all, but he doesn’t stop Neil from following him. Neil slides into the passenger seat, and Andrew drives with complete abandon towards their makeshift office; Neil wonders vaguely why he’s never been pulled over by a traffic cop before.

The factory alarm is off when they arrive, and the place itself is dark and empty. They’re taking precautions, locking their plans away in several different places at the end of every day and even Nicky’s constructions have been whisked away somewhere. It’s a pain to set up every day, but it’s better than being ambushed or leaking an important detail.

There’s a single light on in the corner of the warehouse that Andrew immediately heads for. Kevin is asleep on a recliner, the PASIV tucked neatly underneath it. Even in sleep, his face is pulled into a frown, brow furrowed like he’s in pain. Andrew drags the PASIV out unceremoniously, the metal case screeching as it’s dragged across the concrete, and echoing across the whole factory. Neil goes to get another recliner for himself, but Andrew just lies flat across the dusty floor, swabbing his elbow clean and unraveling a tube for the Somnacin.

Neil makes sure Andrew injects himself first before following him down. He remembers, belatedly, that there’s a good reason that they don’t use Kevin’s dreams for jobs anymore, then the Somnacin hits him like a giant fluffy wall, and envelopes him.

A corridor materialises in front of Neil. It’s stark white, with scuffed tiles under his feet. Andrew stands off to one side, leaning against the wall, and pushes himself off when Neil sees him. Those few seconds’ difference turned into minutes down here, but Andrew clearly still waited for him.

There’s only one direction they can go in, as there are no doors on either side, so they walk down in silence. At the end of the corridor is an elevator, a really fancy one with touchscreen controls outside of it. They are apparently on the ground floor, and the options are all underground, -1, -2, -3, -4, -5.

Andrew selects all of them.

The doors open and they step inside. It’s circular, and with no need for buttons in the elevator itself, the entirety of the inside is gleaming and polished, reflecting their images infinite times. Andrew looks unimpressed from every angle, and Neil can see his own thoughts clearly on his face: this is a fucking stupid elevator. It’s very Kevin.

The only thing that disrupts the seamless metal is a small button indented near the door, and the corresponding speaker grill for emergencies. Andrew presses down on the button.

“Ready or not, here I come,” he says, singsong.

He takes his finger off and leans against the wall as the elevator starts moving.

“That was suitably creepy,” says Neil.

The door pings gently and starts to open. Andrew bares his teeth mirthlessly at him and looks outside. It’s some sort of sports stadium, the elevator opening near the entrance. “Not this one,” he says, and lets the doors slide close.

The next floor down is some sort of training gym, and Andrew barely glances at it before dismissing that one too.

“What is this place?” Neil has a pretty good idea, but he asks anyway.

“Kevin’s mindpalace,” says Andrew, waggling his fingers. Neil supposes that sarcasm is better than judgemental silence. Andrew shoots a look at Neil, as if testing him. And the thing is, Neil does know, because they’re inside Kevin’s head and Kevin is predictable. He’s orderly and tidy, and it makes sense that his mind is too, so the neatly structured floors with different things on each one is a reflection of how he compartmentalises things.

And by things, Neil means: “Memories.”

“Gold star for you.”

The third level down is some sort of field. The grass is well-tended though, and too green to be wild. Neil thinks golf course at first, but then he sees the footpath with well pounded dirt curving through it, and realises that it’s some sort of running track. Andrew doesn’t get out here either.

Level -4 is a white corridor that matches the one they came in from, and Andrew immediately steps out. There’s no sign of Kevin, and Neil still doesn’t know how Andrew is so sure where Kevin is, or why Kevin is dreaming himself into memories, strictly locked away into floors accessible only by the most pretentious elevator ever imagined by humanity.

This corridor does have doors, with nameplates set next to them. Most of them have two or three names, but Neil doesn’t recognise them. About four doors down, there’s MORIYAMA and DAY, and Neil finally figures it out. This is the complex where Kevin started dreamsharing.

He can hear voices from inside the room, Kevin’s clear and recognisable, passionate about something. The other one must be Riko then, cool and amused. Neil is ready to eavesdrop, see what’s so important about this memory that Kevin’s keeping down here, but Andrew clearly has other ideas as he twists the handle and flings it open so hard it slams against the wall and bounces back.

Neil peers around Andrew as Andrew stands in the doorway. It’s a bedroom, with twin beds shoved to either end of the room. Unlike the corridor, everything in here is decorated in black: black sheets, black furniture, black carpet. There is, Neil notices somewhere in the back of his mind because he always looks for exit points, no window.

Kevin and Riko are sitting on their respective beds, having what looks like an animated discussion on aspects of dreamsharing if the diagrams on their desks indicate anything, but the moment he sees Andrew, Riko’s face morphs, his amused facade crumbling away into rage.

“You,” he snarls, throwing himself forward as if he can physically intimidate Andrew into backing up. “What are you doing here? This is not your place!” At a foot taller than Andrew, he looms over him. Andrew looks up, jutting his chin out as he does so with no hesitation, and Neil is close enough to hear Riko’s pained exhale of breath and see his eyes unfocus.

Kevin’s projection of Riko slumps forward, and Neil sees a glint of metal as Andrew slides his knife out. Somewhere, an echo of the boy he used to be admires the efficiency of the knife. Across the room, Kevin is standing, staring at them, one arm outstretched – perhaps to stop them? It doesn’t matter now, anyway; Andrew hefts Riko’s body onto the floor with a grunt, wipes his knife off on the corner of the black duvet and slides it back into the black bands around his forearms.

Neil notes dispassionately that there isn’t very much blood. It seems that even Kevin’s projections are considerately tidy.

Andrew steps over the body, marches up to Kevin and grabs the front of his t-shirt, pulling him down so he can glare at him more comfortably. “You are making this very hard for me,” he says.

Kevin swallows. “I know.”

They did this before, Neil remembers. It hadn’t registered last time, because he was too busy freaking out about the massive invasion of privacy and being driven off by a murderous Andrew to understand, but now he wants to know what, exactly, Kevin seems to be making difficult for Andrew.

They stay like that, a stalemate, until Neil asks mildly, “Is this job going to be a problem for you, Kevin?”

Kevin looks over at him like he’d forgotten Neil was there at all. “What?”

Neil waves vaguely at the dead projection at his feet, who also happens to be their mark. “I was just wondering.”

And speaking of wondering, Neil has a hundred questions for Kevin, most of them variations upon What the fuck. This dream, this place, is everything dreamers aren’t meant to do. It’s honestly amazing that Kevin’s managed to keep this whole dream structure stable, because memories have a way of running away with themselves, because they can’t be contained down to a single scene, there’s alway what happens after that, and after that, and after that, and after that the dreamer is lost.

Kevin scrubs at his face, looking more hollow eyed than before, and Neil wonders if Kevin is also capable of forging. “I’ll make it work.”

“Yes, you will,” says Andrew, which is somehow both threatening and reassuring. He lets go of Kevin and about turns. Instead of just shooting them all, he walks back towards the elevator. Neil follows and, eventually, so does Kevin.

There’s another touchscreen waiting for them, and Andrew waits until Kevin is standing next to him that he taps the screen just below the button for level -5. “This is new,” he says casually, as if Andrew ever says anything just for the sake of it.

His finger is raised above it, as if he’s thinking about whether to tap it or not, and Kevin lays his hand on Andrew’s wrist. “Don’t,” he says, and just sounds tired.

Andrew stares at his hand, as if Kevin’s never touched him before – and perhaps he hasn’t, since Kevin really isn’t the touchy-feely type.

“Pl–”

“You know how I feel about that word,” says Andrew, cutting him off. Andrew’s voice sounds tinny now, as if he’s getting further away; Neil recognises it as the Somnacin running out, lightly taking them out of the dream as the walls melt away into foam and then mist, and Neil feels himself drifting off and waking up.

Neil rolls himself up and out of the recliner, not even bothering to pull the needle out of his arm. Kevin lies with his eyes open, and Neil doesn’t wait for him to pull himself out of whatever existential hole he’s dug himself into. “What the hell was that? Memories, Kevin? You bitch me out any time I use scenery that looks vaguely familiar but you’re heading down into your own head to relive whole memories?”

“I wouldn't get lost in them,” says Kevin, which is an argument that only Kevin can make, really. It’s infuriating in its arrogance.

“I’m going to punch you in the face one of these days,” says Neil. “You told Nicky you were working on the job.”

“I was,” says Kevin. “I’m making sure that Riko won’t turn up in it.”

Next to them, Andrew doesn’t so much as twitch, but somehow Neil’s drawn to his presence anyway. “I told you to let me worry about that,” he says. As always, Neil feels like he’s missing huge chunks of information.

“How is going into a memory going to stop your projection of Riko from entering the dream?”

Kevin spreads his hands helplessly, and lets Andrew pull the needle out of his elbow for him. “If I can just talk to him…”

Neil stares. Kevin’s treating his brain’s manifestation of Riko like it’s a real person, someone he can talk to and reason with. It clicks. He’s not putting himself under and reliving the Good Ole Days over and over – “You’re trying to change the past,” says Neil softly as the realisation hits him, and in that moment he feels like he both understands Kevin Day a whole lot more, and thinks a lot less of him.

They drive back to the hotel in silence, Kevin terse and Neil thinking. He has no idea what Andrew is doing, but he saw the way Andrew watched him figure things out, like a scientist watch a lab rat figure out a maze.

Andrew shepherds Kevin into their shared room as soon as they reach it, and Neil finds Nicky waiting up anxiously in his own.

“Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” says Neil, which is a stretched approximation of the truth. “Probably best if you don’t leave him by himself anymore though.”

“Sure,” says Nicky, who has the look of someone who knows not to pry too much.

Neil drags himself to the bathroom to get ready for bed, again, and the lights are off when he gets out. He slides under the covers gratefully, and goes to sleep. He doesn’t dream.


	8. Chapter 8

Now they've got their team assembled, they can start in on logistics. It's easier to adapt dreams and surroundings to the team's strengths, and this is when Kevin drops into casual conversation that he wants Neil to forge him in the third level.

"That's a stupid idea," says Neil.

Kevin shoots him an annoyed look, though he should really be used to Neil disagreeing with him by now.

"Why don't you just be you?" It takes Neil a lot of effort to emulate someone completely – not just in looks, but in maintaining their character, their personality, and quirks, especially when it's someone the mark knows well as Riko does Kevin.

"Good question," says Andrew, and Neil looks over to see him twirling around in one of the office chairs, gazing up at the ceiling. He shoots Neil a sharky grin when he sees Neil looking, and Neil scowls.

Kevin ignores whatever is going on between the two of them, and says, "I don't want to be distracted."

That's remarkably self-aware, coming from Kevin, so Neil leaves it for now. He doesn't exactly want Kevin's projection of Riko turning up halfway through either, so he resigns himself to observing Kevin for the upcoming weeks. He already has a pretty good forge of Kevin in his head just from exposure, but he'll need to tweak it. Kevin thinks Neil is an undertrained amateur and treats him as such; what Neil will need is how Kevin acts around Riko.

The second unexpected turn of the day comes with the news that Kengo Moriyama, Ichirou and Riko's father, is in the hospital. Kengo is ostensibly a wealthy businessman with stakes in a number of other international companies, but nothing more to the outside world, so it's not mentioned in the papers. It is Ichirou who sends the news to them, along with a message that merely reads: ‘It is almost soon.' The implications send a chill along Neil's spine.

Surprisingly, it's Nicky who comes up with the idea for their first level. He's obviously used to working with Kevin and Andrew, and is relentlessly cheerful despite it, and Neil makes a mental note to himself to look beyond the surface of that relationship, because there's going to be more than what he's seeing. Unfortunately, it's going to have to go on the back burner, because there's about a hundred other more pressing things Neil needs to know and absolutely no one seems inclined on letting him know.

Nicky's pulling out his laptop, googling things he wants to weave into the layer. "We can catch him on his first night there; no one sleeps well on the first night away from home so it won't seem out of the ordinary that he has a strange dream. That'll give us what, a solid seven, eight hours of sleep? That's 140 hours in the first level, which is –"

"Almost six days," fills in Neil.

"Right. Which is plenty of time. Ichirou can book him a hotel or something in advance, so we'll know which one to stake out, and the first level can be a modified New York City." Nicky leans back, satisfied with his contribution even though the sum of Kevin's approval is a nod.

Once they've sorted out what the levels will be, Nicky can start adding detail to the mazes he's designed, turning a dead end into a back street or a hidden route into an air vent with Dan's help.

Kevin and Matt work on mechanics and dosage, figuring out how to get the best out of their worn PASIV and how much sedative and Somnacin each of them are going to need according to their body mass and metabolism. Kevin buys more superfoods, and mutters something about Andrew's level of alcohol consumption, the hypocrite.

Neil watches Kevin.

And Andrew watches Neil.

It's necessity really, that has Neil using the PASIV. It's not like he can practice his forging in reality, so he goes under into an empty room. It usually resembles a changing room like one in a clothing store, except it's a large one and there are several mirrors at different angles.

Here, he changes into Kevin, and it's Andrew who joins him. Kevin's too busy, for one, and for another, he's terrible at facing himself. Neil understands the feeling all too well, but it's still irritating to be faced by Kevin insisting that he doesn't wave his hands that much, or he doesn't lean his weight on one leg when he stands, so they stop doing that pretty quickly.

Andrew, on the other hand, is a completely different problem. He knows Kevin inside and out, and also knows what Kevin is like around Riko. He can point out small details that Neil has never noticed, but half of the time he doesn't bother to help, just imagines up a couch for himself, looking at Neil through the reflections and letting him struggle to figure it out.

"If you're not going to be helpful, why are you even here?" asks Neil once, making eye contact via the mirror as Andrew sits with one leg tucked up underneath him.  
  
"You're too stupid to be left alone," says Andrew.  
  
Neil turns. He hadn't really expected an answer from Andrew, so that in itself is as interesting as what he says. "I'm not Kevin. I'm not dreaming so I can deliberately try to talk to my subconscious."  
  
"No," says Andrew. "You just ignore it instead."  
  
Neil lets Kevin wash away, rocking back on his heels so that he's his own height again. "It's working out so far," he says snappishly. Everyone in dreamsharing has their share of problems, and Andrew has no right to be throwing stones at anyone. He doesn't even seem to want to be here.  
  
He turns back to the mirror, annoyed that he's let Andrew get to him – or rather, annoyed that he's let Andrew see him get to him, because Andrew gets to him quite frequently really – and tries to concentrate on Kevin again. Kevin fades in and out of Neil's features, because he's too distracted, and eventually Neil gives up and lets his mind take him where it will instead.  
  
In a moment, Andrew is staring out of the mirror back at him.  
  
"This is awkward," says the real Andrew, walking up behind Neil so they stand side by side. There are differences: dream forgery isn't an exact replica of a person, it's a mental representation and in this case, it's Neil's mental image of Andrew. Neil's shorter than Andrew is by about an inch or so, and his features are a little sharper. Neil adjusts them automatically, now he has a point of reference standing next to him.  
  
"You're aware I already have a twin," says Andrew. Neil's never met Aaron Minyard, so he wouldn't know what the subtle differences between them would be. Neil's also pretty sure that this is the most number of consecutive words Andrew's ever said to him without being asked a question first.  
  
Neil mimics him, rolling his shoulders down, hands in pockets, head tipped slightly to one side and eyes dead. "You're aware I already have a twin," he says, just to try it out. The inflection is a little off, but it's certainly not bad for a first go.  
  
Andrew's eyes narrow, and that's not a pleased smile across his face exactly. "There seems to be an echo in here."  
  
Neil isn't going to push his luck. He lets his mental grip on Andrew disappear, and Neil is back in a heartbeat, but Andrew waves a hand. "Show me," he says, and goes back to his seat.  
  
This time though, he's watching Neil properly. Neil slips into one of his creations, a forge that isn't another person but features pulled from several people to create someone who doesn't actually exist in the real world. Neil's had a lot of time to people watch, so his bag of tricks is pretty good. He turns into men and women, children and elderly alike. He's got a self-conscious teenager, and a Air Force captain he saw in a museum once, and a nun.  
  
"Like the Old Man of the Sea," says Andrew.  
  
Neil frowns, not understanding, but he's lost Andrew's attention now, and his internal clock is telling him that his three minutes of Somnacin that equates to an hour in dreamtime is close to running out, and he still doesn't know if he's really nailed Kevin's chin, so he goes back to that, this time happy to be ignored, until the dream starts to fade away.  
  
When Neil wakes up, there's someone looming over him, and years of justified paranoia make him simultaneously lash out and throw himself over in the other direction.  
  
"Fuck!" Whoever he hit doubles over where Neil had landed a punch on their thigh, and Neil peers over the edge of the recliner from the floor where he'd landed.  
  
"Andrew!" Neil huffs, about to tell him that he should know better than to startle Neil, when something seems off. "...Not Andrew."  
  
Neil stands, and sure enough there's Andrew on the other recliner, just sitting up now. The one who'd been lurking over Neil must be the other Minyard twin then, Aaron. They're identical in features but there's something about their facial expression that sets them apart – Neil's sure he'll figure it out soon now they're both here to compare.  
  
"Not Andrew," confirms Aaron, straightening up with a scowl. "Fuck, see if I help you again."  
  
He stalks off, and Andrew and Neil watch him go. He didn't even say hello to Andrew. Neil's not sure if Andrew even knew Aaron was coming, because Neil certainly didn't. Then again, it might be Kevin's oversight; when he worked with Neil, there were times when he would think that something was so obvious that he would neglect to mention it to Neil.  
  
"You're our Chemist then?" asks Dan with her eyebrows raised. Little wonder, because most teams just buy Somnacin brand, though usually on the black market. Chemists are rare, and have questionable reputations, since it's difficult for them to test their drugs.  
  
Aaron's lips thin. "I'm a paediatrician."  
  
Everyone looks at Kevin for an explanation. "We need to try out some custom blends of Somnacin. Three levels will be unstable with standard Somnacin, and we need some way to communicate between levels to figure out timing and kicks." _Aaron is here to make sure no one goes crazy_ is implied. He looks at Neil, and opens his mouth again. Neil shakes his head; he'd rather not discuss it in front of everyone else.  
  
Aaron has a lot of equipment that doesn't seem like it would belong to a paediatrician, and he seems to know how Kevin and Andrew and Nicky work, so Neil presumes that he joins their dreamsharing teams every so often between his practice. He has no interest in the intricacies of their planning though, or in getting to know them, so Neil leaves him to set up, and lets Kevin have that conversation he wants.  
  
Kevin is spectacularly terrible at subtle gestures, so when they walk off to one side, Nicky, Dan and Matt cast them curious looks, and Andrew just gets up and drags his chair over so that he can hear. Kevin gives him an annoyed look, and makes as if he's going to walk somewhere else, but Neil snags his sleeve; Andrew's just going to follow them around, ignoring the hint, so he might as well hear it now.  
  
"When we use different formulae," asks Kevin, "will you have a reaction?"  
  
"Of course," says Neil. "That's the point of using different formulae, isn't it?"  
  
Kevin glares at him. "You know what I mean. Don't be obtuse."  
  
"And I thought you were actually concerned about me for a second there," says Neil. He licks his lips, and Kevin must sense that he's trying to figure out what to say because he waits him out, albeit impatiently.

"Show me what formulae you want to try," says Neil eventually. "I should be able to recognise some straightaway and let you know what the effects are. And you can test the rest on me first. I'm better equipped to deal with it."

His words feel like cotton in his mouth as they tumble out. He's already feeling nauseous at the memories, of the feeling of something being _not quite right_ but his brain being too clouded to figure out what. He remembers waking up to overly bright lights, the phantom pain of a torturous death lingering in his head, his thoughts back up to speed but his legs strapped to a bed.

Out of everything, Neil hates feeling slow more than anything else; he needs his quickness, both of brain and of body, to keep him alive.

It's exactly because he knows what this feels like that he would never subject anyone else to it first. Neil's already fucked up and broken – he's not even certain which bits of him are missing at this point, because he doesn't remember when he was whole – so it doesn't matter if a bit more chips away. At least this time it's voluntary.

Neil's almost forgotten that Andrew is privy to this conversation until he speaks up. "This sounds like a tragic backstory."

It's not a question, and it's not a demand, but Neil feels the pressure of it anyway. Kevin, for once, stays silent, letting Neil decide how much to tell and busying himself instead with finding a list of the combinations he wants to try.

"I did a couple of those Somnacin clinical trials."

"Liar," says Andrew.

It's the truth, technically. Neil just neglects to mention that he was a teenager, and his father more or less sold off his kid's brain for science (for money), and that it was more like a couple of hundred trials of chemical concoctions that drove half the subjects insane, and that's when he first met Kevin and Riko, and half a dozen other things.

"It's not the whole truth," admits Neil readily. "But I feel like you got a head start when you combed through my brain, so that's all you're getting."

"I could just do it again," says Andrew, and honestly if he tried, Neil would be hard pressed to stop him because he was so smooth at it the first time, Neil doesn't even know how to defend against Andrew.

Neil tries a different tactic. "I'll swap you. A truth for a truth."

Andrew cocks his head. Neil is realising that it's Andrew's tell that he's caught his attention, both good and bad. "Almost interesting," declares Andrew, which is practically a declaration of excitement coming from Andrew, and he walks off.

Neil watches his back for a moment, wondering if he'd offered too much. He needs to think about which truths he's willing to give up, a story that will hold without giving him away.

When Neil is in bed at the end of that day, he vaguely remembers that he wanted to look up the Old Man of the Sea, and tells himself that he'll do it when he wakes.


	9. Chapter 9

The Old Man of the Sea is a greek mythology figure who could take the form of all manner of creatures and animals. It was said that he could be forced to give a true answer to any question if he was captured, and the only way to do it was to cling on to him when he tried to change forms to escape, and exhaust him and his transformations until he gave in.

Neil doesn't much like the sound of that. He wipes his search history, works out which truths he's willing to eke out to Andrew, and shores the rest up in his head.

He takes a look at the list of concoctions Kevin produces, and reluctantly drags his mind back eight years. The standard formula for Somnacin has existed for a couple of decades now, but there are always deviations. There are ones that inhibit certain brain functions in the taker, or stimulate others. There are some that suppress imagination and others that stretch time differently. And all of these formulae need trials, human trials.

Neil scribbles notes as best as he can next to each suggestion: 'gave subjects headaches and nausea', 'slows both time and thinking speed', 'made the environment thick, difficult to walk through', 'made dream volatile'. There are gaps in Neil's memory though, because there were so many, and so many variations on each one, and it wasn't as if he had a lot of information about what they were pumping him with in the first place.

It seems helpful to Kevin anyway, who frowns at some of the notes and circles others that he wants. Neil attempts to talk to him about who's dreaming which level. The third is the most important, the one where they have to plant the idea that Riko can surpass Ichirou.

"Kevin."

Kevin drags his gaze away from the notes.

"About the third level. Look. Can Andrew be the dreamer instead?"

"He doesn't dream," says Kevin impatiently, and dismisses the thought immediately.

Neil rubs at his face. At any other point, he'd be wondering what that means, and why Andrew doesn't dream, but he seriously needs to sort this out. "Someone else then. You don't trust me to monumentally fuck this up. I don't trust me not to monumentally fuck this up."

Kevin blinks at him. "Who said I don't trust you with it?"

"What?"

There's a pause, as Kevin and Neil stare at each other in mutual confusion. Kevin breaks it first. "If I did not trust you to do it, you would not be doing it."

That's probably the nicest thing that Kevin's ever said to him. It's also the end of the conversation, as Kevin looks back as his list, clearly distracted.

Neil stares at his back for a moment, and then shakes it off. Coming from Kevin, that was a ringing endorsement, and honestly, Neil is going to need a bit of time to process it. He compartmentalises it away for later, like he does with probably too many things, and leaves Kevin to it. This might be a good time to learn more about the mechanics of the PASIV from Matt Boyd, as he's currently working on the one they'll use for the job. They need to increase the Somnacin capacity, since there are so many of them going down for so long, and he's replacing some of the older parts anyway.

Neil doesn't get the chance though, as he's intercepted by Andrew. "Come along! We have supplies to pick up," says Andrew, who cuts across Neil's path towards his desk, expecting Neil to follow him. Andrew is in an up mood today – Neil is hesitant to call it happy, but he's certainly _something_ – which makes Neil automatically wary. He knows how to deal with a lack of emotion, especially since he spends so much of his time trying to suppress his own, but he's not really sure how to respond to too much emotion. It feels like every little thing could set Andrew off.

"Can you not pick them up by yourself?"

"I thought," says Andrew as he gets Nicky's attention and points at Kevin, making sure that Nicky knows not to leave Kevin alone, and then turns his attention back to Neil, "that you could go first in our little deal."

"What? Our – Oh. I'm pretty sure you've got a few truths from me on credit," says Neil. He grabs his duffel bag on the way out.

Andrew waves a hand airily. "But that was before we started our game."

Neil keeps his mouth shut as they get into the car. He still doesn't know how much Andrew gleaned from that dream dossier he extracted out of Neil's mind. It couldn't have been that much; there were pages and pages of it and Andrew only flicked through it all in a few seconds. The deal was a truth for a truth, and while Neil could just keep lying, he suspects Andrew puts a lot more weight on his word.

As much as the idea of peeling away the layers and layers of anonymity he's glued onto himself over the years galls Neil, he's got to take it for the chance it is. A chance to get some real answers out of Andrew.

"Nathaniel Wesninski is reported to be dead," says Andrew as they join the flow of traffic. "Died eight years ago."

It's a jolt to hear his real name, aloud, in reality and not in a dream, and Neil nearly chokes on it. "You said you wouldn't say that name again."

"I agreed that I would not call you by it," corrects Andrew. Neil lets the shock and resentment curdle in his stomach and waits him out, because there hasn't been a question, not yet. "Who are you running from?"

It takes Neil a few tries to get the words past his numb lips. "My father. And his people."

"Nathan Wesninski, the Butcher of Baltimore. Catchy," says Andrew, and Neil really shouldn't be surprised that Andrew knows. He's the point man, he's Kevin's partner, and he's been fiercely protective of Kevin every step of the way. It's literally his job to know everything about everyone involved in their job, and he's already shown that he doesn't trust Neil. In retrospect, of course he would go away and do research based on what he already found in Neil's head.

Neil waits for Andrew to press, and then realises that Andrew is waiting for him. "Why did you stop working with Kevin a year ago?"

"You do go straight for the jugular," says Andrew, sounding pleased. "Our dreaming was incompatible. We couldn't work together."

"Couldn't?"

"Couldn't."

"In what way?" asks Neil, frustrated.

"Uh uh." Andrew wags a finger at him. "My turn."

The words 'that's not fair' die before they can crawl out of Neil's mouth; he doubts Andrew cares. "You're stingy over your truths," he says instead, slumping down a bit into his seat.

"For someone on the run, you're not making much of an effort to stay out of the spotlight. Why Kevin?"

That's easy. "He's the best." Neil can be stingy with his truths too.

Andrew doesn't actually make the sound, but Neil can vaguely sense the snort in the air anyway. "You and he are of a breed. Junkies."

"Why do you dreamshare if you hate it so much?" It's frustrating really. Neil's seen for himself how good Andrew is at it, but it's like he doesn't put any effort into it at all.

Andrew taps a cigarette out of the box. "I don't care about it enough to hate it."

Neil scowls out of the window. He's going to have to think more about how to phrase his questions. "What's your next question?"

"I'll let you know."

They drive west for a bit, Andrew turning the car radio up to an almost obnoxious volume and chain smoking out of the window. At some point, Neil actually recognises where they are – they're drawing up to Wymack's apartment. He's Kevin's preferred supplier of Somnacin, to the point where they've detoured out of their way to get it from him.

Wymack is unusual in the sense that he operates out of his apartment, which is not only small, but also where he actually lives. He opens the door for them with his usual brusque force. "Neil. Minyard."

He's prepared for them, because alongside the mountains of dirty plates and mugs is a large stack of small crates of Somnacin. There's also a couple of boxes of supplementary chemicals, for Kevin's variations. There's Neil fails to smother his surprise quickly enough; this is the largest amount he's ever seen Kevin order.

"Yeah, I know," says Wymack, catching his look. "I did ask if he'd added extra zeroes and he nearly bit my head off for it, perfectionist bastard."

This is probably the real reason Andrew dragged him along – between the two of them, it still takes them two trips to get all the Somnacin into the car, and it irks Neil that he couldn't have just said that in the first place. Wymack, of course, is no help.

"I supply the stuff, I don't carry it," he says, crossing his arms, which are well muscled despite his age. Neil resists the urge to tell him that he clearly lugs his Somnacin all over the place, because his apartment is only three rooms big and he's not actually making the stuff in his apartment, so clearly he's got to transport it from _somewhere_. Instead, he rolls his sleeves up, and gets carrying, noticing with some embarrassment that Andrew can lift one more crate than he can at a time.

"Neither the brawns nor the brains, apparently," remarks Andrew. He ignores the remaining three crates to turn to Wymack. "How's Bee?"

"Doing well. She's sorry to have missed your visit," says Wymack. He fishes out a folder from underneath various others, making the rest of them waver precariously, and holds it just out of reach for Andrew. "Whatever you're up to, I don't want to know about it."

Andrew takes the files, which are on Evermore. "You're no fun."

"Get out of here," says Wymack, shooing them out of his apartment.

Andrew tosses the file into Neil's lap when they get back into the car, and Neil rifles through the papers.  

Evermore is ostensibly a military base. In reality, it's the best experimental research centre for dreamsharing in the United States, run by Riko's uncle, Tetsuji. There's full blueprints in the file, showing the sprawling extent of the base underground. Along with it are CCTV screenshots and blurry photos that look like they were taken in a hurry.

They're going to base the second level on Evermore, which is easy as Riko is intimately familiar with it, and also difficult… because Riko is intimately familiar with it. Luckily, it's going to be the level that Kevin is the dreamer for, and their best source for details on Evermore is Kevin, but everyone (Andrew) agrees that it's for the better that Kevin does not take everyone down into a recreation of Evermore and trap everyone in a massive meltdown of a memory. Neil remembers being in Evermore, but he only ever saw a tiny portion of it, the same three rooms over and over and mostly the ceilings of them, so he's no help.

But Kevin had reached out to Wymack, and it had turned out that he knew people who knew people and, long story short, they have a very comprehensive set of notes. It's mostly for Nicky, so he can turn the facility into their own maze, so Neil leaves it all with him, aside from the few pages he found on the Somnacin chemical trials, which he keeps for himself.

Neil goes to see if Matt is still working on the PASIV, but it appears that he's taking a break. He and Dan and Nicky have set up camp near Nicky's work table, behind which is a 3D model of the maze Dan's going to dream. It's still mostly half-formed polystyrene at the moment, but it is slowly taking shape. The layout of the maze itself is going to be on a need to know basis – it's better if none of them know the details aside from Dan so the information can't be pulled out of them – so Neil doesn't join them back there.

He takes a look around the factory floor. Kevin's preoccupied with chemical equations at his desk – he'd make a very good Chemist if he ever decided to give up the extraction part of the job – and Aaron is in the corner, FaceTiming his girlfriend or something. He does that a lot. Andrew is nowhere to be seen.

Neil grabs a PASIV, and nonchalantly slides off towards one of the small rooms off the factory hall. It looks like what used to be an office, with imprints in the ground where the desk and filing cabinet used to be. They haven't cleaned in here since they're not really using it, so there's a thin layer of grime over the floor.

Neil grimaces, and then wonders when he became unused to dirt and grime and unsanitary conditions when that's what he operated with for years. He wedges his back against a corner, and hooks himself up to the PASIV.

There's a reason that Neil wanted to be alone when he tried it. It's a crucial part of the plan, so he needs it to be perfect, but the mere idea of it freaks Neil the fuck out. The Somnacin slides uncaringly through his veins and he finds himself in the changing room he uses to practice forges.

That's the easy part. It takes Neil several seconds to swallow his nausea, to push his thumping heart down from his throat back into his ribcage, where it pounds painfully against chest, before he steps up to the set of mirrors. He glances at each, and pulls the image of the man he wants to turn into up into his head; it comes up in jagged details in his mind's eye and between looking in one mirror and the next, he's changed. Neil's vision swims.

"Hi dad."


	10. Chapter 10

Nathan Wesninski is a large man, in every way. The years have put on some weight around his belly, but he's tall and imposing to go along with it. His distinctive auburn hair is starting to go grey, but he's not the sort of man to dye it. The tendons in his neck are abnormally distinct, layered on top of muscle mass that clumps around his shoulders and runs all the way down to his large, hammy fists.

There are scars that take a moment to appear, starting as lines etched across his body and raising into puckered skin. Nathan isn't afraid of getting into a fight, though that doesn't happen often with his reputation, but there are still a few reminders that he's made of flesh and blood. His eyes are blue, bright blue, and when Neil finally tears his gaze away from them, he sees the smile instead.

It's a manic smile, more delirium than joy, and it stretches his face into a grotesque mask.

It's a very good forge. Lifelike, constructed from overly vivid memories, with a few extra details to demonstrate how many years have passed since Neil's seen him. It's perfect, even. Which is probably why Neil is having a panic attack.

A panic attack in a dream is not the same as a panic attack in reality. Generally, they – like nightmares – wake up the dreamer. The dream starts to collapse, even as Neil tears his eyes away from the mirror; the walls disappear, only reappearing when he's looking at it.

Neil wheezes, attempts to coax himself through it with every method he knows how to stave it off. Spider cracks appear in the floor, spreading out from beneath his feet. This can't happen on the job. He's standing on thin air. The floor is back. This can't happen on the job.The mirror turns blank; it's still silver, but it doesn't reflect anything now and Neil reaches out a hand, pawing at it blindly, not understanding why it doesn't show him what he needs to see. This can't happen on the job.

The voice comes from behind Neil. "This is fun."

Neil jumps five fucking feet into the air. There's an awful crack, like the sound of all of Neil's ribs breaking at once as he inhales too sharply, and the walls of the room cave in towards them, and then – everything snaps back into place.

Neil stands, shaking and sweating, as he stares uncomprehendingly at Andrew Minyard.

"Don't let me get in the way," says Andrew, somehow managing to only minutely move his shoulder and yet clearly gesture at the mirror.

Neil turns back towards it, and almost has a second panic attack. This is Neil without the contacts and without the hair dye and with a wild look in his eyes and Neil doesn't know if he was so startled he stopped forging completely and this is Nathaniel looking back at him, or if he just dropped half of Nathan's features but kept the other half. He closes his eyes. Inhale. Exhale. Opens his eyes. Neil is back.

In the vast expanse of the mirror reflection, the room is empty. Neil can hear his heart ricochetting off his chest, a too-fast beat that drums in his ears. He turns around; Andrew is gone. He looks around for a moment, as if expecting him to appear again, but it's just him, and the blank walls, and the mirror, which yields no clues. Neil frowns; his projections have always been active, but they rarely speak to him. He wonders what it means that his projection of Andrew is appearing and actively interfering in his dreaming. He doesn't want to turn into Kevin. He dreams up a gun, not wanting to wait out the rest of the time he'd optimistically put on the clock for practice.

Neil wakes up still wedged into the corner of the office. He coils the PASIV tubing away, rolling his sleeve down, and goes to open the door again when it swings open under his hand. He lets it linger under his hand for a moment; it was definitely locked before he went down.

He gathers himself and heads back out into the main factory area. Andrew is standing next to Kevin, and doesn't look over at him.

There's never anything that lets Neil confirm his suspicions that Andrew broke into the office to come looking for him, but Neil never manages to sneak away after that. Andrew is remarkably good at breaking away from whatever else he's doing and following Neil whenever he tries to go off by himself.

It's irritating, and makes him feel like a child being watched over, and it's also really not inconspicuous. Matt and Dan notice, and raise eyebrows at him, and Neil shrugs and smiles awkwardly. Kevin knows, and his idea of words of wisdom is to tell Neil that he shouldn't piss Andrew off.

"Well thanks," says Neil, and slinks off in an another attempt to shake Andrew. It doesn't work.

Aaron ignores him, and Neil doesn't even know if he's noticed. Nicky takes the longest to figure out that something's going on, and that's because he's trying to explain something to Andrew when Andrew sees Neil trying to disappear and peels away from him mid-conversation. Nicky's also the only one who brings it up, though he does at least wait until they're in their hotel room.

"Soooooo," says Nicky, "what did you do to incur Andrew's wrath?"

Neil mostly ignores him, firstly because he's used to Nicky's chitchat by now, and knows that Nicky's pretty happy to carry most of the conversation by himself, and secondly because he doesn't really know the answer. "Who knows what goes on in his brain," he says sourly, and kind of regrets being so mean immediately. He doesn't really have room to throw stones given what's happening in his brain.

The next day, it occurs to Neil, belatedly, that he could just ask Andrew. So he does. Andrew's smoking on the roof of the factory, and Neil clumps up the rusty fire escape stairs to get there. He's not afraid of heights, but the wind under his feet and the swaying metal creaks makes him climb faster. He's not one to tempt fate. (People, yes, but not fate.)

"What do I need to do to get you to leave me alone?"

Andrew looks over from where he's sat on the edge of the building, and exhales smoke. Neil thinks that maybe he should have started with something else, perhaps some context, but then Andrew says, "I told you already. You're too stupid to be left alone. Don't make me repeat myself."

"I'm not Kevin," says Neil, again. He's so used to operating alone – even when he and Kevin worked jobs with just the two of them, Kevin would come down to critique Neil's forge, but never just to watch him practicing.

Andrew stubs out his cigarette and heads back down the stairs. "You're also not your father."

And that, Neil supposes, is that. He does need to practice turning into Nathan, practice schooling his features and keeping his face blank whenever he catches sight of his own horrific reflection, but the next time, he waits for Andrew to make his way over, and offers him a PASIV needle, and Andrew comes down with him.

It's never as bad as the first time, now that Neil knows what's coming, but Andrew never stops coming. Neil compartmentalises his forge, concentrating on certain features at a time. It's harder to lose sight of himself when he builds up parts of Nathan like a jigsaw, and even though there's still an instinctual swell of nausea every time he sees his father on his own face.

Andrew seems perpetually unimpressed. It helps, surprisingly.

Neil has, he thinks, the most amount of work to get sorted. He's got three forges, plus the layout of a level. Once Nicky's done creating the mazes, and is teaching Dan and Kevin their levels, Neil has to start work on his. He thinks he recognises some of it from Kevin's memories, and decides not to mention it. The field is only part of it though, because the running track moves into woods, hilly ground with streams breaking it up, and the trees provide the maze, clumped together to force the runners into certain paths.

Nicky shows him the secret shortcuts hidden in among the foliage, and Neil carefully makes a couple of them hidden but obvious. He wants Riko to find them, and feel like he's gaining an edge.

"This is so stable," says Nicky, looking around, impressed. "You picked up the map really quickly."

Neil follows his gaze around. There are none of Neil's projections around, mostly because it feels like the sort of environment that is sparsely populated, so his brain doesn't fill people into the spaces here. "Really?"

Nicky laughs. "Oh, yeah." He looks at the nonplussed expression on Neil's face. "You have no idea, do you? Yeah, this is stable, and yeah, you're really good at this. You must have some comparison, or worked with other extractors, or something."

"I've worked with Kevin?" To be really honest, which Neil isn't, Neil has experienced some really unstable dreamers, but he always assumed that was because they were coerced, and untrained, and just plain bad at dreaming. He hadn't thought that it would be the norm.

"Your standards are skewed," says Nicky, waving his hands as he talks. "Kevin is the best of the best, I get that, but he's also fucking nuts. Riko fucked him up so he couldn't dream properly, and now his own guilt is swallowing him and until he fixes all of that, his dreams won't ever be stable, you know?"

"His own guilt. What do you mean?"

Nicky looks sideways at him, eyes widening as he realises that he's fucked up. "Oh, shit. You don't know? You worked with him for a year, that makes him practically your best friend."

Neil grimaces, because whatever he and Kevin are, it's not friends, and Nicky laughs at that. "Okay, but seriously, Neil, if you don't know, I don't think I should be the one to tell you."

"Andrew would kill you?" Neil guesses.

"Dead," confirms Nicky. "He would kill me dead."

They walk through the woods, and Neil tweaks their surroundings as they go. The earth beneath their feet goes damp and their feet sink in. The leaves on trees get softer but the bushes turn brittle. "How do you deal with him?"

Nicky smiles awkwardly. "He's my cousin."

Neil knows all too well the ties that blood bring, but he doubts that Andrew feels the same way. "He's not very nice to you."

"Doesn't matter," says Nicky, and it's the first time that Neil's heard a little thread of steel in his voice. "I'm not ready to give up on them. On him. I moved to be with Erik, but I never would have if I knew how much this year would change him."

Neil mulls it over. "This year. Something happened, about a year ago," he says slowly as he tries to piece together the slivers of information he's gathered over the years. "Something that made Kevin strike out on his own."

"Kill me deeeead," repeats Nicky in a singsong voice, but even in a dream, his face has gone pale. Neil feels bad for pressing, a little, but Nicky seems to be the weak link and his best bet to figure out what happened.

"You're not telling me anything," says Neil. "I'm just thinking out loud, and you happen to be here. Do you think I should add wildlife?"

"What?"

"Wildlife," says Neil. "Woods have animals. It's unnaturally quiet at the moment."

"Oh! Yeah, I guess so." Nicky seems thrown by his attention to detail, but Neil makes his living and his survival by being good with details, so he adds some birds in the trees, and thinks of animals he thinks belongs in woods.

"Something happened that created a rift between Kevin and Andrew, that made them separate and stop dreaming together. Andrew won't dream without Kevin, so he just stopped dreaming but Kevin's obsessed with it, there's no way he could stop. So he found me, and started working with me." Neil's close to working it out, he knows it, especially given the way Nicky's gone quiet.

"It was inception, wasn't it? That was when Kevin tried to perform inception on Andrew."

Nicky stares at him in wide eyes. "You _do_ know."

"I bullied it out of Kevin," says Neil with a grin.

"Well," says Nicky, brushing a branch out of their way. "It was a good try. He was gutted when it didn't work, he really thought he could change Andrew."

Neil lets him walk through first, so he doesn't see the thoughtful look on Neil's face. He finally drops the subject, suspecting that he's got as much out of Nicky as he can at this point. It's certainly given him food for thought, anyway, and they're supposed to be figuring out the logistics of Neil's dream level.

The next step is for Nicky to time him. Nicky stands at the end of the track and Neil turns himself into Kevin, and runs.He suspects that a little bit of time to compose themselves it what they both need right now, so they're a little too gung-ho about getting back to business.

Kevin's got longer legs, and it throws Neil's pacing off at first, but after that it's just running. Neil enjoys running, the feeling of freedom and the knowledge that he can get himself away from things if he needs to, and it's not quite the same in a dream, but it's soothing nevertheless. He plans on thinking over the new information he's gleaned in the last conversation, but his brain ends up rolling the same few sentences over and over until they cease to make sense, so he ends up shoving everything to the back of his mind and concentrating on running. He stretches Kevin's legs to their limits.

The dream is stable, and Neil concentrates on fleshing out the details as he goes. He makes tree roots that jut out and he has to hop over, and puddles for him to avoid. There's low hanging branches now, and parts where he has to slow completely to ease his body through. It keeps his mind busy.

Neil doesn't have to sweat in a dream, so he's not uncomfortably sticky by the time the trees start to clear and then it's the smooth expanse of the running track and Nicky at the end of it, looking surprised.

"Neil? Did you use the shortcut?"

"No?" He slows, and shakes his legs out.

Nicky looks back at his stopwatch. "You've got some legs on you," he says admiringly. "I mean, I know they're Kevin's legs, technically, but I don't think he can run that fast on them. Also, maybe don't tell Andrew I accidentally complimented Kevin's legs, he'd kill me."

Neil looks down. "They're just legs."

"Not a legs man, gotcha," says Nicky. "Ass? Arms? Abs?"

Neil blinks, and changes back into himself. "I have all of those body parts."

"Huh," says Nicky. "Zero response, wow. I was sure you were shacking up with Kevin."

Neil's too surprised to say anything. It's never occurred to him to think of Kevin in that way. For one thing, on any given day, Neil's strongest feelings towards Kevin are anger and irritation.

"Hey," says Nicky brightly. "How accurate is your forge?"

"Pretty accurate by now."

"Do you reckon I can see Kevin naked?"

"Andrew. Killed dead," reminds Neil. "Come on, let's go again. I want to shave two minutes off that time."

Neil finishes that dream feeling unusually satisfied. Dreaming with Kevin is frustrating at best and chaotic at worst and his sessions with Andrew leave his stomach churning, though that is more because of what they're doing than the person he's with, so this is… new.

"Good session," says Nicky, beaming as they tidy up. "Haven't come out of a dream without being stabbed, shot or otherwise disembowelled in a while!"

Neil snorts, and then starts when he turns around and Andrew is casually lurking behind his recliner.

He looks between the two of them, and then points a pen at Nicky. "Down, boy," says Andrew.

"Unfair," says Nicky with a pout. "You can't have both Kevin and Neil."

"He doesn't have me," says Neil warily, not entirely sure what that means, his good mood starting to evaporate already.

"Shhh," says Andrew. "Come on, I want ice cream."

He walks away clearly expecting to be followed, and Neil looks over at Nicky, and sees Nicky is looking back at him expectantly.

"Oh, he doesn't mean me," says Nicky, shoving him. Neil goes. He automatically starts towards the passenger seat but Andrew gets there first, and he leaves the door open to light a cigarette.

Neil gets in the driver's side instead, and it's not until after he's readjusted the seat and mirrors that he realises that Andrew hasn't managed to get his cigarette lit yet. His hands are shaking.


	11. Chapter 11

The lighter clicks several times, but there's no flame. Andrew stares at it for a second, before tossing it to Neil. It's a metal one, heavier than he thought it would be when he catches it and it hefts nicely in his hand.

"Click it," says Andrew, and if Neil didn't spend the whole of his life observing other people, he would have missed the way that Andrew's breath hitches slightly before he speaks. Neil clicks the lighter. Nothing. He goes to check the safety band, but it's plucked out of his fingers by Andrew instead.

"Unfortunate," mutters Andrew, and puts it away. He leaves the cigarette on his lips.

As Neil is starting up the car, he sees Kevin in the rearview mirror as he comes out of the warehouse and looks around. He spots them in the car, eventually, and hurries over.

"You shouldn't be driving," says Kevin through the driver's window. "You – oh." He looks confused to see Neil there, so Neil waggles his fingers at him in a wave.

"Looking for Andrew?" Neil points over to the other side of the car.

Kevin goes around to the correct side and shoves a little case at Andrew. "Take it."

The look that Andrew gives him could strip paint from a wall – and yet is not as murderous as it normally is. It takes him a moment grind out an answer. "Fuck you."

Kevin opens the case, and shakes it at him. Inside is a syringe, a medical one for something like insulin. "Take it," he insists. "You're not driving."

Neil entertains the thought that Andrew is a diabetic for all of one second, and then remembers that he is driving Andrew to get ice cream right now, and thinks of the sheer amount of that stuff that he eats. Probably not a diabetic.

Andrew shuts his door in Kevin's face, and tells Neil in no uncertain terms, "Drive."

Neil drives. He only goes as far as the nearest gas station, but by the time he gets there, Andrew is hunched into the corner of his seat, and it's not just his hands that are shaking. Neil parks, and makes an executive decision to go in alone; he's not entirely sure that Andrew can stand from his position at the moment, and even if he did, he'd have to practically carry him around the tiny store.

Neil heads in and picks up enough ice cream for everyone. He's just about to check out when he doubles back, and grabs a bottle of whiskey too. The cashier makes some remark about a really bad break-up to Neil's baffled face as he hands over his (fake) ID, and he heads back to the car. The ice cream goes in the back, and Neil dangles the bottle in front of Andrew.

Andrew uncurls a little and looks at him. His gaze is so blank and vacant of any sentience inside that Neil recoils slightly; then he blinks, and Andrew is back, and Neil thinks he imagined that horrible, horrible emptiness for a moment, except that Andrew grabs the whiskey and drinks a swig straight out of the bottle.

His throat constricts as he swallows. He stoppers the bottle up again, and tucks it into the crook of his arm. Neil drives them back to the warehouse, and by the time they're back, Andrew is mostly sitting upright in the seat.

"Ask," says Andrew, his voice like gravel, when Neil turns the ignition off.

Neil, who had been perfectly happy to just get out of the car and pretend that nothing out of the normal was happening, settles back into place. "It's not my turn."

Andrew doesn't bother to clear his throat. "I'll take one on credit. I can't deal with that stupid inquisitive look on your face anymore."

Neil has been very carefully keeping his face completely blank, but he'll take the chance anyway.

"You're taking some sort of drug," he says slowly. He pauses to think; Andrew waits for an actual question. He's going to lose Andrew's attention if he doesn't think of something, fast, and he wants more time to puzzle over that little syringe Kevin's carrying around in his pocket. He changes tack: "What's with the lighter?"

Andrew blinks, a quick flicker of eyelashes; a tell.

"It's my totem," says Andrew. He takes a moment to respond. "It doesn't work."

It's Neil's turn to be surprised. He knows about totems, though he's never needed one himself. Neil always knows if he's in a dream, because he can change himself, but for people who don't have that skill, a totem is a personal item that is different in reality to what it is in a dream to help someone distinguish whether they're dreaming or not.

Kevin uses one. And, naturally, Neil doesn't know what it is, or what it does, or what it feels like, because the exact point of one is to not let anyone else know those things so that it can't be replicated in a dream. But now he's touched Andrew's, and he knows how heavy it is, and that it doesn't light up, which renders it pointless. If Neil ever wanted to recreate that lighter in a dream, he could.

Andrew leaves him in the car, getting out with his whiskey and the ice cream, and Neil scrabbles to keep up with him. Maybe that's what Andrew meant instead when he said that it didn't work: the totem was already useless and letting Neil know about it was irrelevant. Maybe. Neil doesn't know what to think.

Inside the warehouse, Andrew is spinning around in a chair, already halfway through a pint of ice cream, scraped away around the sides that had started to melt in the warm car leaving a little mound in the middle. He scuffs the balls of his feet across the ground so that he's facing Neil when Neil walks past his desk. That, Neil is vaguely used to by now, despite the fact that it still unnerves him.

What Neil isn't used to is the way that Aaron looks up from his desk, in the corner, to also stare at him. Like a hundred other things since he started on his job, Neil pushes it to the back of his mind. It's getting full back there.

Behind his desk, Nicky is demolishing one of his map layouts, feeding the bits of paper and cardboard into a small fire in a metal barrel, with Dan helping him. "I think we're set for trial runs," says Nicky.

"Should you be setting that fire indoors?" asks Neil, bypassing Andrew's desk to nab some ice cream off the little pile he's hoarding there. Nicky shushes him with a wave of his arm, and Neil lets it drop. That Nicky thinks they're set for trial runs means that all three of them have memorised their mazes. Only the dreamer will know the full layout, because it means that Riko won't be able to get that information out of the rest of them, but they'll still need to know a few things, like the route they'll be taking, rendezvous points and convenient traps if things get sticky – which they will.

It's interesting dreaming with a big team. Matt, Nicky and Aaron are awake up top, which means that Neil doesn't have that crawling sensation on the back of his neck, wondering if someone's going to come across their bodies when they're asleep and shoot them. Dan's a reliable dreamer, and her level is so big that Neil is seriously impressed she only took a week to memorise it.

It's a take on New York, which would make sense for Riko to dream of if he's just arrived there, and they all arrive in Times Square (which, depending on the angle, is actually a triangle in Dan's dream). As active participants, it's easy for them to arrive in the dream at the same destination, but their first task once they get there will be to find Riko, who might appear anywhere in the maze. Dan assigns them each a section to comb through until they find him, at which point they need to set off a visual signal for the others to find them since there is, of course, no such thing as cell phones or internet that works.

Neil doesn't want to get lost, or caught in one of Dan's traps, but he also finds himself just... admiring the dream as he walks through his assigned area. He hasn't had a lot of time to do that lately. Iconic buildings like the Chrysler Building and the Rockefeller Center loom in the distance though they never get any closer the more Neil walks. The streets run into each other and the geography of it makes no sense when Neil tries to think about it too hard, but it _feels_ like New York. He's almost upset that his level won't be nearly as artistic.

When Neil gets back to Times Square, Andrew is there already, but no one else is yet. "Did you even bother to learn your bit?" asks Neil.

Andrew doesn't even bother to glare at him. He will, Neil knows, do whatever it takes to protect Kevin, and despite the fact that he doesn't care about dreamsharing at all, there isn't actually any room for doubt in Neil's head that Andrew has done everything he's needed to do. All Neil really wants to know is how the fucking hell Andrew manages to do all of it so quickly.

"Eight years," says Andrew. "Between Nathaniel Wesninski's escape from Evermore and Neil Josten appearing."

Andrew manages this every time. Every time Neil thinks that he's going to be prepared for Andrew, he's _not_. He doesn't even know how to prepare for it any more. He hasn't told Andrew that he was at Evermore. He hasn't told Andrew how long ago it was he was doing Somnacin trials. He certainly hasn't told Andrew that he escaped from Evermore.

Neil walks unsteadily over to Andrew, and leans against the wall with him. He stares at the scuffs on Andrew's shoes, which are exactly where the scuffs are on Andrew's shoes in reality, except Neil only knows that because he makes a living out of observing the tiny details so there's no reason for Andrew to know that.

A few of the loose threads lurking in the back of Neil's mind start to weave themselves together. He wonders if anyone else knows that Andrew Minyard has an eidetic memory.

"That's not a question," says Neil numbly as he tries to remember – well, everything. Andrew rifling through sheets of paper in a few seconds and memorising all the words on it to be processed later, Andrew taking one glance at Kevin's notes and Neil assuming he was bored and inattentive, Andrew knowing exactly what routes he needs to get through the dream they're in and Andrew staring at him, and Andrew staring at him, and Andrew staring at him.

Which, he's doing now. Neil pulls himself back together.

"What happened in those eight years?" asks Andrew.

"Hope you've got a lot of time," says Neil, which is a weak attempt at a joke even for him, but he's already feeling a bit leaky, like an old, overinflated balloon with a loosening knot, and he can feel _something_ threatening to come out of him and some of it might even be the truth.

"My mother broke me out of Evermore. We went on the run, twenty-two cities in that time. The Moriyamas expected my father to find us and bring me back, so we didn't spend more than a few months in each place."

Neil remembers a blur of airports and the crush of people, because there's safety in anonymity, and the baggy, non-descript clothes in muddy, non-descript colours. He thumbs at the pockets of his jeans, which cling to his legs; they're a relatively new development. "He found us, about two years ago. Not him personally, he's in prison, but his people. My mother died."

Mary had hid it from him until the end, when the blood seeped through the layers she swathed herself in and her eyes no longer focussed enough for her to keep driving. Neil had switched with her and kept them going down the highway, windows open in the summer heat and the tang of the salt from the sea stinging his eyes until he looked over at her and she no longer looked back at him.

He'd burned her and the car and buried her bones and gone underground to mourn and came back out the other side dazed and wrecked. Neil hadn't known how to survive alone. He had spent months people-watching, wondering how they lived their lives, and he had imitated them, had pulled on a swagger from a frat boy and an easy grin from a barmaid. That was when he realised that his clothes actually made him look out of place, unnaturally undesirable, and he had pulled a t-shirt and jeans that were so tight he scarcely dared to breathe, and that was when he stumbled upon a dream party.

It was being hosted in one of the other rooms of the shitty motel he'd been staying at, a group of barely adults going under with no clue as to the possibilities other than to build stupid fantasies they wanted to live out.

Neil found the guy hosting the dream, the one with the PASIV and the contacts, and he went under into the first dream he'd had in six years and he remembered the freedom he felt the first time he'd gone under and changed himself into anyone he wanted to be.

And then he dusted off the PASIV his mother stole from Evermore, and picked a new name, one that matched the new him and his new clothes, and hadn't looked back since. He was still afraid of what he would see if he looked back.

"And then you got over her death and now you're here," says Andrew, as brutally succinct as only Andrew can be, and it startles Neil into a laugh, a coarse eruption of emotion that catches him by surprise.

"So you're a runaway," says Andrew. "The most stupid runaway I've ever met, to have come back to the ones after you."

Neil is about to argue – Tetsuji is the one who bought Neil for use in Somnacin trials, and Ichirou seems to have little interest in the pursuits of the branch family at all – but he can see Kevin jogging over to them, looking irritated already.

"Have you bothered to learn your sections of the maze at all?" demands Kevin the moment they're within earshot. He huffs at them as he crosses the last few yards of ground between them.

Neil pushes himself off the wall, and seamlessly morphs into his forge of Kevin as he does so. "Couldn't you do it any quicker? A child could learn that maze faster than you," he says in Kevin's voice. Kevin scowls ferociously, but beside him, Andrew almost snorts in amusement. He'll take it.


	12. Chapter 12

It takes a while, but Neil finally gets a chance to ask Matt to take a look at his PASIV. When they're heading up in the hotel elevator, Nicky says that they should watch a movie or something to unwind for a bit, especially since most of them have spent the day technically asleep anyway. He asks with a hopeful glance at Neil, who shrugs and nods, because he doesn't really care. He could do with something to take his mind off the job.

Kevin heads straight into his room, muttering something about logistics and times, so Andrew follows him; Aaron disappears to who knows where, consistent in his lack of interest in being a civil human being, and that leaves Matt and Dan.

They come hang out in Neil and Nicky's room to chat about their dream den and how they met, and the movies they watch and like to draw inspiration from, because all three of them are good at that small talk thing. Neil just listens; to him, it's incomprehensible, having a life outside of dreamsharing or being on the move, of job after job.

He waits for a natural pause in the conversation, when Dan and Nicky are flicking through the channels for something to watch, and fishes out the PASIV from where it's been languishing inside his duffel bag. He still takes the bag with him to and from the warehouse, but that's because he needs to take files of notes and pictures with him for convenience. The PASIV has just been tucked into an end of it all this time.

"It's not related to the job," says Neil to Matt, "but I wanted to know if you could fix this up?"

The metal case is battered, but Neil knows it's well padded inside. There's both a padlock and a numerical lock, which Neil opens quickly before swivelling it around on the bed for Matt to see.

"Whoa!" Matt reaches for it eagerly, and pokes around, looking for a serial number or something. "This thing is ancient. Where did you get it?"

Neil's kept it in good shape, making sure to clean out all the tubing and scour away any bits that threaten to rust, but it is still almost ten years old. "I stole it from Evermore," he says, which is the truth, though a pretty truncated version of it. "It's one of the first ones that allowed for more than two dreamers."

The original design allowed for the one person dreaming and the other person controlling the dream. It was developed as a training program, like virtual reality except powered by the workings of the brain rather than a computer, which quickly expanded as the military realised the possibilities behind it. That had been the start of the Somnacin trials that Neil had been a part of.

"You _stole_ it from Evermore?" asks Dan, overhearing and looking over in interest. "How did you manage that?"

"I was trying to leave, and it was still attached to me at the time," says Neil. "So I took it with me."

"No shit," says Nicky, his face practically twitching with the need to know.

Neil tries to keep his expression blank; he's not entirely sure if he wants to talk about it at the moment. "I'll tell you the whole story if we manage to get through this job," he promises instead. If Riko does ruin himself, as Ichirou wants, then it won't matter. Until then, it feels too much gloating that he got away, and he's spent too much time running away to truly feel like he'd made it out.

Matt is trying to get into the guts of the PASIV, and Neil produces a mini tool kit he keeps for much the same reason. When Matt pries the cover off, he whistles. "Surprised this is still functioning. It'll take me a while, but I'd love to give it a go. How attached are you to its original form?"

"As long as it still fits in the case, I don't care," says Neil.

Matt teases out some wiring with the end of a screwdriver. "You could probably sell it for a decent amount to a collector who's interested in the history of dreamsharing," he says.

Even the thought of selling it makes Neil twitch. "It's just as a back-up plan," says Neil, trying not to sound defensive and knowing that he's failing. "In case I want to set up shop by myself."

It's also the last thing he owns that has a connection with his mother. It sounds silly, feels silly now he's admitted it to himself, but the idea of throwing everything in between identities had been so ingrained in him during his years on the run that he'd got rid of his clothing and his bags and moved to a different hair dye before he realised and by then there was no trace of her left apart from the dents in a battered metal case and the fading bruises of her fingertips around his wrist.

"Well, it's serviceable. I'll see what I can do," says Matt, just as Nicky settles on a channel. They settle down in companionable silence as some movie about cars flickers out of the screen at them, and Neil curls up on his pillow. He watches Matt put the PASIV away for now, and cautiously probes himself for feelings. It used to be that he'd panic if that thing went out of his reach, but Matt puts it on a chair and there's nothing resembling the gut-churning panic he used to get. Huh.

About ten minutes later, Neil realises that he's been staring at the flickering screen the whole time, but he has no idea what's going on, so he quietly fishes around in his bedside cabinet until he finds the papers he'd put away on the Somnacin trials, and reads through them instead.

Neil reads at a considered pace. Andrew would probably consider it slow, but Neil likes to parse the words over in his head, rolling out their meaning silently across his tongue as he reads. The documents are dry and clinical, outlining the procedures for each trial. They were used to refine variations of the formulae, which Neil already surmised, but it's still like a punch to the stomach each time he reads that a 'subject' reacted badly and threw up after the dream or attacked a researcher or couldn't move their limbs afterwards.

There's a section on various compounds that did work, so Neil makes a note to pass them on to Kevin, and then there's a list of the participants. Neil scans through the sparse physical descriptions, trying to find himself. His eyes hurt after a moment – the documents are out-of-focus pictures someone's snapped of the original files, but they're still mostly legible.

He remembers some of the other participants; they weren't supposed to speak to each other, but there would be other people dreaming in the same room that Neil would see day in, day out. The records show that most of them actually were willing volunteers, adults signing up for clinical trials that would pay them enough to get out of debt, or who were doing it for their families. People who were allowed to go home in between trials. Neil wonders if they thought it was worth it; he wonders if they ever went home the same.

He's scanning the names, looking for N. Wesninski when someone else's catches his eye. _A. Minyard_. Neil takes a moment to parse it. The description is brief, but it mentions how the subject was neurotypical on initial testing, but it became quickly apparent during the trials that he reacted atypically to the chemicals and, to quote the notes, 'had an undesirable attitude'.

Neil revises the things he knows about Andrew Minyard:

  * He is the only point man that Kevin Day will work with
  * He was invited to participate in the military-funded research program that Kevin had been a part of, and turned it down
  * He is very good at what he does



True, the list has expanded since, but it doesn't match up with what he thought he knew. How could Andrew have been invited to work on the development of dreamsharing and extraction, but also have participated in the preceding chemical trials? Neil doesn't remember seeing him, and he would have remembered anyone else as young as himself. The words don't offer any more clues the longer Neil stares at it, and at this point Neil's going to have to recount his entire life story to Andrew before he gets enough questions to answer everything he wants to know.

He almost forgets to look for himself after that, and when he does finally find himself, it's the second blow of the evening. Nathaniel Wesninski was a volunteered participant, it says, as in someone else volunteered his services on his behalf. It also mentioned that Nathan Wesninki's debts are considered repaid. Debts. _Debts_.

The letters swim in Neil's vision until it doesn't look like a real word anymore. He had always thought his father greedy, willing to exploit his own flesh and blood for money, of the opinion that Neil would never be worth more to him than that. He had never known that Nathan had been in debt – and in debt to the Moriyamas at that. Neil's world view has been turned sideways, and he makes an audible sound that sounds like car skidding across wet pavement just before a fatal crash and he looks up to see Dan, Matt and Nicky all staring at him.

"Neil?" asks Matt cautiously. Behind them all, the movie flickers onwards.

Neil inhales a ragged breath. "I have to –" he breaks off, unable to bear yet another lie at the moment, and tumbles off the bed so quickly his legs only just manage to catch him. He makes it to the door, somehow, because if there's anything he's good at, it's staying on his feet no matter what, keeping them going on in front of the other, and he's halfway down the corridor before he realises that he's only in his socks and he's still holding the sheaf of papers.

Shit.

There are other people in this hotel, normal people here on vacation and that sort of thing, people who can't see Neil wandering around two seconds from having a meltdown. He goes back to the room, but he can't deal with Dan and Matt and Nicky at the moment, who are perfectly nice, but they don't _understand_ , and that leaves Neil standing outside Kevin and Andrew's room, thumping on the door.

There's no immediate response, and Neil bangs on the door again before it opens.

"Andr–" Neil stops in his tracks. "Aaron?" He's never sure how he knows, especially when Aaron is wearing long sleeves so Neil can't see if he has black arm bands on, but he's spent so much time with Andrew now that speaking to Aaron feels like talking to a bad forge of Andrew. That's probably a bad way of telling them apart.

"Andrew's not available," says Aaron, and starts to close the door again.

Neil tries to wedge his foot into the gap before remembering he has no shoes, and leans his entire weight against the door instead. "I need to talk to Kevin. I don't care what they're doing."

Aaron swears with the sudden weight, and steps away from the door, allowing Neil to fall through the doorway still clutching the loose papers against his chest. Neil walks in; Kevin and Andrew are lying on their beds, with the PASIV on the floor between them. Aaron goes back to the armchair he was in, where his laptop is somehow hooked up to the PASIV too. "Like I said. Not available."

Aaron's laptop screen is full of diagrams and charts, monitoring Somnacin intake and vitals. It's only momentary distraction, but Neil notices the wireless electrodes taped to Kevin and Andrew's temples and fingertips – and Aaron's too, for easy comparison.

Neil paces up and down the length of the room as he waits for them to wake up. There's only another minute on the PASIV timer, but it feels like the longest minute of his life. Judging from Aaron's glower in the corner, Aaron thinks so too.

When they do finally wake up, Andrew all at once and Kevin slowly and reluctantly, Neil is practically hovering over Kevin's body. Andrew is out of his bed and between them in an instant, the PASIV needle still in his arm. He doesn't quite shove Neil away, but he uses his body as a barrier.

"Did you know?" asks Neil, his voice too loud as Kevin squints balefully at him. "Did you know that my father was in debt to the Moriyamas?"

Next to him, Andrew laughs. It's not the same one as when he's in a up swing, too happy and delirious and sharp like a knife; this laugh sounds like the wheeze of a dying man's last breath and Neil finally looks at him properly. Andrew's shaking again and he looks like he's barely standing, but here he is, between Neil and Kevin.

Kevin reaches out as if to help Andrew, but pulls his hands back when Andrew hisses at him. They stay like that for a moment, frozen, before Kevin pushes himself up.

"I knew," he says, carefully. "I thought _you_ knew."

Neil shakes his head at him, momentarily mute. Andrew evidently decides him to not be a danger to a half-awake Kevin after all, and curls up on Kevin's bed as his body starts to wrack. He pulls the lighter from his pocket, and clicks it repeatedly, monotonously, until Neil, already far too wound up, snaps. "It doesn't fucking light, Andrew."

"Stop," says Kevin, pulling Neil off the bed and away from Andrew. He reaches for his pocket, pauses, and then grabs the bottle of whiskey on the bedside table instead and thrusts it at Andrew before facing Neil. "Yes. Your father worked for the Moriyamas, and he owed them money."

There's a lot to process, but Neil is good at prioritising. "So Ichirou was never just here for you then," he says softly.

"No," says Kevin. Neil suddenly knows what it feels like to be Kevin, to have tried and tried to have put his past behind him only for it to catch him, and he feels like he's going to be sick. Andrew beats him to it, grabbing the wastepaper basket to dry retch into it.

"I need some air," says Neil, feeling nauseous just watching him. His feet are itching, and even two months ago, this would have been the sign for him to get up and start running and not look back.

"Running away?" says Andrew; it actually takes Neil a second to realise that it was Andrew speaking, because it sounds like his voice strained through gravel. He hasn't drunk any of the whiskey, even though his fingers are white-tight around the bottle neck.

Neil shakes his head. He can't leave now, he knows that. It's sink or swim for the entire inception team, even though he knows that there's no swimming for him. "Just a change of scenery."

Andrew uses the piping still stuck in his arm to pull the PASIV across the carpet towards them; Kevin makes a wounded noise of protest at the rough treatment of his precious equipment but Andrew ignores him. Instead of pulling the needle out of his arm, Andrew leans over and jerks Kevin's out of his arm, eliciting a real wounded sound this time. He flushes it out with antiseptic and wipes it down, and then holds it out to Neil.

"What?"

"A change of scenery. Hurry up."


	13. Chapter 13

Kevin attempts to intercept the needle before Neil can take it, and nearly ends up with a needle through his hand for his troubles. Neil takes it away before someone can actually get hurt.

"You should not be doing this," says Kevin, keeping his voice down. Neil does that thing where he pretends he can't hear them despite being barely a foot away.

Andrew's probably only getting his words out through sheer force of will and stubbornness. "You do not get to tell me what to do."

Kevin reaches into his pocket and pulls out a case – the one Neil saw an injection in – and Andrew ignores him, deliberately doesn't look at him as Kevin holds it out. Kevin scowls at him. "You can't keep your promise if you shred your mind!"

Truth be told, Neil is curious. Andrew's told him that he can't dream, Kevin's said that Andrew can't host a level, but now Andrew is holding out the needle and offering to show him what that means. Neil knows better than to stick his nose in other people's business. He shouldn't want to know what the answer to this puzzle is, because that would mean that he cares about these people.

Neil starts, as the realisation hits him. He _cares_.

The movement draws the gaze of both Andrew and Kevin and Neil is too blindsided by his sudden acknowledgement of feelings, fucking hell, he hasn't had any of those aside from fear and anger in years, to hide his astonishment.

Andrew jabs a finger at him viciously, and Neil somehow knows that it's Andrew complaining again about his 'stupid, inquisitive face', even if he doesn't know _how_ he knows that's what it means.

"Are we going under or not?" asks Neil, keeping his tone forcibly light, sliding the needle into his arm.

Andrew inclines his head, and so Neil ignores Kevin's scowl and wedges himself between the beds with his back against Andrew's bed.

Aaron moves up then. Neil had almost forgotten he was there; he'd been so entirely unconcerned with their argument or the state of Andrew all the way through. And even now, he only moves up to hand out more electrodes.

Neil peels the sticky backing off his and puts them where he can see them on Kevin, and by the time he's figured it out, Kevin and Andrew have finished having another one of their silent conversations. Kevin still doesn't seem happy, but he reaches out to rip all of Andrew's old electrodes and replace them with new ones as Andrew remains huddled on the bed.

"Two minutes," says Kevin, hovering over them. That might be forty minutes in dreamtime, but it's really not very long at all. Andrew waves his assent, and Kevin finally retreats for long enough to glare at Neil as if this is all Neil's fault. Neil ignores him, as usual, and presses the button.

The dream wafts into Neil's awareness. He had half thought that it wouldn't work, but here he is, standing next to Andrew. He isn't sure where here is. The sky is grey and the ground is grey, not that Neil can tell where one ends and the other starts. In fact, everything around them is grey, not in the sense that a layer of fog is hiding everything, but the air itself is grey. There aren't any buildings or people or even wind. The entire dream is just... blank.

"Ta da," says Andrew flatly. Neil stays quiet.

Neil keeps expecting something to happen, for a building to suddenly loom over them or a landscape to emerge. He keeps waiting for the grey to clear, to dissolve into other colours.

But nothing happens. The dream is just empty.

Andrew brings two fingers to his mouth; a cigarette appears between them somewhere between the beginning of the gesture and the time Andrew slips it between his lips. Andrew raises a lighter to the cigarette, the same one he uses as his totem and there's a flicker of something – surprise? – when the flame sparks into life, but it vanishes as quickly as the lighter flame when he takes his hand off the lever.

Andrew drops the lighter and it vanishes. The cigarette fades from between his fingers when Andrew moves his hand away. He gestures somewhere to his right, and Neil looks. A building appears, sharp angles and rough concrete, and it sags into mist when Andrew looks away. He starts walking in a random direction and Neil falls in step with him. Paving stones appear beneath their feet, irregular and realistic with cracks and weeds in the spaces between, but they disappear when Neil looks behind them.

He thinks he gets it now. He's piecing together the comments that Kevin has made over time and the clues that Andrew has dropped him. Andrew didn't bring Neil down here to show him some dreamscape or special talent or a map. He brought him here so Neil could see what dreaming is like for Andrew. Neil reaches out, even though there's nothing there, and the grey is almost corporeal, like taffy through his fingers. This is Andrew's mind, in its purest form.

Given his eidetic memory, Neil would have previously thought that Andrew was an effortless dreamer, able to recall any design after a single glance. But Andrew struggles to feel anything, having spent too long carving his feelings out of his mind, and his dreams reflect that. His feelings are a flatline and his dreams are grey and Neil's here in the barrenness of his brain, the only light the glowing cherry of Andrew's cigarette, when it's there.

Neil sits down. He puts his arms out behind him and leans back, closing his eyes and tipping his face to the sky. He hears Andrew move beside him, the tiniest rustle dampened by the dream. He opens his eyes to see Andrew sitting next to him, one leg tucked up to his chest and his arm draped across his knee.

One cheek is nestled into the crook of his arm so that he's facing Neil and his face is in shadow, and the sky turns – well, it doesn't quite turn blue, but it seems less grey than before.

"Just what I needed," says Neil. "A change of scenery."

"My projection of you is usually more sarcastic," says Andrew.

Neil frowns. "I'm not a projection."

Andrew shoves the lighter into his face, and clicks it alight as if to prove his point. Neil pushes it aside impatiently. "It's a dream, so it lights. But I'm in the dream with you."

"Why would you come here?" asks Andrew, waving his hand at their non-surroundings.

Neil feels like he's being judged, and he's never been good at these sorts of tests so he answers honestly. "Because you're here."

Andrew stabs the cigarette in Neil's direction. "You are insufferable," he says, and the tip of the cig spits out sparks.

"You're a terrible liar," says Neil. He kind of feels like smiling, so he does.

And Andrew stares.

Neil steals the cigarette. It feels like mist between his fingers but he lets it burn anyway. There's no smell to the smoke, and it doesn't actually burn into ashes but the act of holding it is familiar and comforting, so Neil rolls it around in his fingers until Andrew reaches out to still his hand.

Andrew's fingers are cool to the touch, his palm indented from the patch of pavement that exists just underneath them and Neil unfurls his fingers without thinking about it, laying the back of his hand against Andrew's. The cigarette falls to the ground, and it doesn't disappear.

And Andrew stares.

"I'm not a projection," says Neil again, more insistently this time. Andrew curls his fingers over Neil's wrist and Neil can feel his heartbeat pulse against the tips of his fingers.

All too suddenly, the dream moves from beneath them. The paving stones disappear, flattening out into dirty concrete. They're not moving, but the ground is falling away from them; they're sitting on the edge of a roof, feet dangling over the edge and they're three storeys up, five storeys, seven, ten. Andrew's fingers are tight around Neil's forearm, the same vice grip he'd used weeks ago except this time Neil is clutching him back, pulling him close and grounding him.

The building wobbles beneath them, threatening to disappear, and Andrew's curt breaths betray how much effort it's taking to keep them up there. Andrew stands and leans over the edge of the building precariously, Neil his only anchor, and suddenly there's wind, the sharp kind that only comes with this kind of height and cuts through skin, and Andrew holds out his arms to feel it with relish.

Neil isn't afraid of heights, but he still appreciates their danger, even in a dream, so it feels like an age until Andrew steps back from the edge of the building, his hair windswept. "There must be easier ways to feel," he says as he stands up.

"So I'm told." Andrew has to look up to meet Neil's eyes from this distance, but he doesn't look uncomfortable as he peers up at Neil with half-hooded eyes. "Yes or no?"

Neil takes a moment to realise what he's asking, but he trusts his gut. He trusts Andrew. "Yes."

Andrew leans in, and presses his lips to Neil's. His lips are dry and fingers are still tight around Neil's forearm and he kisses like the wind on the top of an imagined building, demanding and unyielding and when Neil gasps, his breath is snatched away from him.

It's Andrew who pulls away first, and Neil unthinkingly leans towards him until Andrew stops him with a hand on his chest. Neil rocks back onto his feet. His entire head feels woozy, and it's his turn to stare as Andrew finally peels their hands apart.

The building slowly slides down and the ground slides up until they're on level ground again, and everything dreamt is gone, apart from the cigarette, which still lies on the floor, the tip still glowing.

Andrew reaches out with one finger and forcibly turns Neil's head away.

"My stupid inquisitive face, I know," says Neil impulsively, biting the inside of his cheek to stop himself from grinning.

Andrew examines the outline of his hand against Neil's forearm, blotchy and red against the paleness of his skin, and says, "It's only a dream."

Neil raises an eyebrow, because of all people, Andrew should know: "Just because it's a dream doesn't mean it isn't real."


	14. Chapter 14

Andrew wakes up from the dream, and rolls himself over to throw up into the wastepaper basket. Neil would like to believe that it's nothing to do with him and what they were doing a moment ago. He slides the needle out of his arm, putting it away careful as Kevin barges in between them.

Kevin hovers, ominous but not quite touching until Andrew unfurls his fingers from his fist and twitches them at Kevin. Kevin snags the end of his armband and yanks the whole thing off in one go, sliding a syringe in between his cramping fingers.

Neil pulls his knees up to his chest and watches as Andrew takes the time to steady his hand, sliding the Somnacin needle out and injecting himself in the same place.

In the corner, Aaron frowns, and taps away at his laptop.

Andrew's breathing evens out almost instantly. He withdraws the syringe and drops it into the trashcan even as a protest falls from Kevin's lips – something about hazardous materials – and rasps, "Get out."

Neil gets up. He leaves the stack of paper he'd brought into this room what feels like hours ago now, and leaves. When he turns to shut the door, he finds Aaron right behind him, balancing his laptop. He blinks, confused; he'd have thought that Aaron would stay, but it seems like whatever happens with Andrew and those drugs is only between him and Kevin.

When Aaron sees him looking, he scowls and heads to his own room, leaving Neil baffled. He has to knock for Nicky to open the door – he'd completely forgotten his keys, his shoes, everything – and Nicky thankfully doesn't ask any questions aside from if he's alright.

"I'm fine," says Neil, and lets Nicky shuffle back to bed. He presses his fingers to his lips, trying to remember the feeling of Andrew inhaling him in like air, and is startled by the electrodes still clinging to his fingertips. He peels them all off, and wonders what data they revealed.

Andrew is bright and cheerful and all sharp edges the next morning, and he and Kevin have evidently read all of Neil's pilfered information from Evermore even though they're pointedly not discussing it. They spend their time working on the Somnacin, Kevin protesting when Andrew messes with his careful calculations and Andrew waving him away carelessly.

It's fine. Neil needs time to process what's going on too. He stays away from the two of them and looks around the rest of the room. It feels particularly empty at the moment; Dan and Matt are the only two of them unlikely to be recognised at Evermore, so whoever Wymack's contact is has managed to smuggle them in as researchers. They have miniature cameras on them and Nicky is combing through their live footage for minutiae that they've missed, or Kevin hasn't mentioned.

That leaves Aaron, who is reading through the papers Neil left. He's so engrossed that he starts when he looks up to see Neil standing right there, and pulls the piece of paper towards himself, as if Neil hasn't already read it.

"What did you do to him?" asks Aaron, keeping his voice down.

"What?" Neil gestures at the papers. "That wasn't me, that was–"

"Last night." Aaron cuts him off impatiently. He puts the piece of paper down on the desk, smoothing down where his fingers have crumpled it. "You know he _doesn't dream._ "

"He insisted. You know that, you were there." Neil has had a lot of practice interpreting what people mean from the limited information they given in their actual speech, but most of that practice was on Kevin, and it's usually pretty fucking clear what Kevin is talking about.

Aaron snorts, disbelieving. "You don't mean – stay there." He gets up to retrieve his laptop from his bag as Neil obediently stays. Andrew opens the screen in front of him, flicking through to some graphs and charts that Neil doesn't really understand at first glance.

"This is mine," says Aaron curtly. He points at a line that squiggles across the page, pretty uniformly spiking up and down. He points at a line of a different colour, which is labelled 'Kevin'. That line has more activity. More ups and downs, occasional blips, but still regular. Aaron moves his finger down again, to a third line that is Andrew's. His line is not the same. There is still variation, but the peaks and troughs are shallow, and there are completely flat stretches between them.

"Andrew doesn't dream. He doesn't dream, he doesn't feel. He hasn't since, since _this_." Aaron jabs at the piece of paper detailing the chemical trials.

Neil opens his mouth to say that he didn't force Andrew to dream, but Aaron is already flicking through to another chart. This time, there's Aaron, Neil and Andrew on as lines. It takes Neil a moment to understand, to connect, his hindbrain making connections quicker than Neil can. Aaron uses himself as a baseline, for easy comparison, and Kevin's brain activity looks like Aaron's because it's normal. No – neurotypical. And Andrew is not.

But in the second chart, Andrew's brain activity has changed. There's more of it, little blips that interrupt, and the spikes are larger, building up in momentum until there's a frenzied up and down scribble near the end.

Neil blurts it out as his mind makes the connection. "You were signed up for the Somnacin chemical trials. You tested for them and you were neurotypical."

Aaron stares at Neil, derailed from his original anger. "How the fuck do you know that?"

Neil points at the pile of papers, words tumbling out of his mouth almost faster than his mind has thought it all through. "I assumed it was Andrew. A Minyard, undesirable attitude. But it wasn't, was it? Tested for neurotypical. That was you. But then – then Andrew swapped places with you at some point, didn't he?"

Aaron doesn't look at Neil, which is an answer in itself, really. "How do you know he wasn't... neurotypical before they did that to him?"

"If he were, you wouldn't be so pissed off because you feel guilty," says Neil, and Aaron flinches.

"I'm asking what you did to him _yesterday_."

Neil knows a deflection when he hears one. He's better at it than Aaron is. "I didn't do anything. He did it himself."

Aaron jaw works in silence for a long moment. Eventually, he smacks the laptop shut. "You're as fucking impossible as he is. Whatever it is, you deserve each other," he says and turns his back on Neil pointedly. Neil is pretty sure this is the longest conversation they've ever had.

Across the room, there's a horrific _crack_ , and Neil flings himself behind the desk without thinking. His mind screams _gunshot_ and his hands scrabble for the pocket of a bag he no longer keeps near him. There's silence after that, but there sometimes is after a gunshot, when his eardrums are numb, except then Aaron is still standing and looking at Neil like he's a fucking moron, and Neil realises that he can hear after all.

He stands up slowly. Not a gunshot. On the floor is Kevin's phone, a single crack across the middle of the screen. Kevin stares at it, and it's Andrew who eventually leans down and picks it up. He reads whatever was on the screen with no expression at all, and slides the phone back into Kevin's pocket.

Everyone else in the room watches as Andrew grabs Kevin by the wrist and forcibly drags him out of the warehouse; they exchange looks with raised eyebrows and shrug at each other. None of them left know what the fuck is going on and it seems that Andrew isn't going to deign to tell them. Neil brushes the dust off his knees, and jogs after Andrew and Kevin.

As he passes, Nicky catches Neil's sleeve, but lets go again just as quickly. "Let us know," he says. He hasn't made any move to go after them, but his frown sinks into every corner of his face.

Neil nods, and trots to catch up with Andrew and Kevin, sliding into the back of the car just before Andrew drives off. When Neil looks up, he sees Andrew's eyes in the rear view mirror, and glares back until Andrew just starts the car without saying anything. In the front seat, Kevin stares out of the window and hyperventilates.

They're only headed back to the hotel, but Kevin is getting increasingly grey and shaking violently; he misses the door handle twice before Andrew opens it from the outside and catches him before he falls. Neil's never seen him like this.

Kevin is fierce and brilliant and utterly devoted to his work, and he's tough on Neil and tougher on himself and a raging alcoholic, but this is different. This is like a ghost of Kevin slumping in the corner of the elevator, waiting until Andrew drags him out and into their room. And even now, Kevin is saving the worst of it until he's in private, when the hotel door is locked behind and he sinks onto the floor where he stands.

Neil has to walk around him to get into the room, as Andrew seems happy to leave him on the floor there. Andrew takes his coat off, leaving him in a black t-shirt with those armbands he always wears, and drapes it over the back of a chair. He grabs a bottle of vodka and pushes it into Kevin's hands. He looks at Neil and says curtly, "You take the window."

He wedges himself with his back against the door and sits down. Neil looks at the window of the room, and back at Andrew, and then leans gingerly with his back against it, not entirely sure what he's doing it for. And he waits. Patience is not one of his strong points, since he's never exactly had to cultivate it, but Andrew doesn't seem flustered, doesn't seem angry, doesn't seem anything at all, so he's not too worried. Yet.

Kevin gulps at the vodka, and the two of them just watch him. A third of the bottle later, and Kevin's lips start to loose. "We're not ready," he says, with the voice of a man who's just flayed the skin off the back of his throat with spirits.

Neil raises his eyebrows, and looks at Andrew. Andrew looks back at him, entirely unhelpful. "Not ready for what?" asks Neil, and Kevin looks up, startled, as if he hadn't been expecting Neil to be there at all. His hand taps his pocket where his phone is and Neil kneels next to him to dig the phone out. It's still working despite the cracked screen and the drop, and Kevin hasn't got a lock on it, so Neil swipes through to the last message.

It's a picture of an obituary, with a brief message underneath it. 'The funeral will be on Sunday.' There's no name associated with the number, but it's a New York area code.

The funeral is on Sunday. It's Thursday now, which means that they have to pack up, extract Dan and Matt from Evermore with no suspicions, get to New York and perform inception sometime in the next three days.

"Shit," says Neil. "We aren't ready."

That, at least, makes Andrew laugh. It's not an actual laugh, but more a louder-than-normal exhale of breath, but it counts as laughter from Andrew. Kevin flails an arm out to catch the table in an effort to stand, and Neil hauls him to his feet. Vodka sloshes as Kevin sways. "He's going to find us and he'll know it's a dream. He'll _know_. And then – and then."

Kevin shudders, and inhales some more vodka. The smell of it envelopes Neil, reminding him of knife wounds and tacky, half-clotted blood, and he retreats back to the window. It's not open, but the cold of the glass through his shirt helps ground him to reality. "And then what?"

"And then the dream is his. If he knows it's a dream, the dream is his. He'll change it to whatever he wants. And we'll be trapped there, however he likes. You don't know. You don't know what his dreams are like." Kevin's voice gets increasingly louder, increasingly shrill until he's pacing in wobbly circles at the foot of the beds. He claws at the wall, the embossed parts of the wallpaper peeling with a deadened scrape that raises the hairs on the back of Neil's neck.

He'd always thought of Kevin and himself as similar, but apart. Kevin was the lucky one; the one who got to participate in the most exciting technological advance of recent years, paving the way for neuroscience and the future; Neil was the grim reality of science, the unforeseen side-effects and human guinea pigs. He watches little coils of wallpaper embed themselves under Kevin's fingernails as the man he's envied for so long crumbles into an incoherent, drunken mess.

The bottle of vodka slips from Kevin's numbing fingers and spills over his shoes. He looks at it blankly for a moment, and then lurches across the room to get another one. Neil would have stopped Kevin by now – he's had most of a bottle in a very short space of time – but he's taking his cues from Andrew and Andrew is still leaning against the door, his arms crossed.

He finds out why when Kevin launches himself at the door.

"I need to go back. I'll tell Riko, tell him everything and he'll forgive me. He'll take me back." Kevin scrabbles at the door, but Andrew is suddenly on his feet, shoving Kevin back with his body. Kevin tries to wrestle him but Andrew is sober and better at it than Kevin; he twists his wrist away from the handle, grabbing him around the waist and forcibly thrusting him back into the room.

Kevin trips over the dropped vodka bottle; it rolls under one of the beds, spilling the rest of its contents as it does so, and in the second that Neil's eyes are distracted by the movement, Kevin makes his move.

"Fuck," wheezes Neil as 200-odd lbs of panicked drunkard throws itself at him.

He is suddenly all too aware of how difficult it is to stop Kevin without actually hurting him. Andrew must have had practice, because Kevin elbows him in the face as he tries to open the window.

"We're on the ninth floor, you fucking asshole," growls Neil, blinking the explosion of white stars out of his eye as he clutches Kevin's bicep like a particularly overweight koala.

"Riko will forgive us if we tell him everything," says Kevin reassuringly, hysterically, as he strains and nearly lifts Neil off the ground, and, right, well. Neil's well of sympathy is a dried up, miserable thing to begin with, and Kevin has just drained the rest of it out. Besides, Neil isn't trained to fight in any way apart from dirty. He knees Kevin in the groin and watches him collapse to the ground.

" _Ninth floor_ ," he repeats incredulously to Kevin's foetal form.

Across the room, Andrew exhales louder than usual.


	15. Chapter 15

The journey to New York takes them just over eight hours with Nicky at the wheel. Neil expected Andrew to take the front seat, but given the night they spent protecting Kevin from himself, if not his liver, it's probably best not to leave him alone. Andrew points at the back, and they jam Kevin in between the two of them. Aaron looks at them all incredulously before getting into the front without saying a word.

As for Dan and Matt – well, Neil left an urgent message with Wymack and they're just going to hope that they will get out and join them in New York in time. They are all steadfastly ignoring the possibility that they won't get Dan out in time and there won't be anyone to dream the first level.

Nicky drives like someone who thinks traffic is a thing that happens to other people, but they still get there after Riko, who has the advantage of a privately chartered helicopter. They return the rental car and get a yellow cab to the back of the Park Hyatt. There's someone there waiting for them, a tall blonde woman leaning against the wall and not smoking a cigarette.

"Allison," says Nicky with a smile. She casts a critical eye over them – at Kevin still nursing his hangover despite the handful of painkillers Nicky foisted onto him, Neil and Andrew sandwiching him between them, Aaron as apathetic as usual and Nicky stuck carrying all of the gear – and does not smile back.

"I hope you know how difficult it is to clear out three specific rooms on half a day's notice," she says, and flicks her manicured fingers at them in a gesture to follow. Neil's seen the blueprints for this place, has had them memorised since Ichirou told them that this is where Riko would stay for a hypothetical funeral, but it's still much nicer than their usual haunts.

Alison leads them up the service elevators so there's no chance they'll bump into Riko. Neil watches her as she walks; she's wearing a staff uniform and she has an master key pass, but Neil would bet that she doesn't actually work here if he were a betting man. She nods at other staff they walk past, and they nod back, but there's just something about the way she holds herself, her complete lack of a customer service persona. She's got to be one of Kevin's contacts, but he hasn't mentioned it to Neil and he's in no shape to talk at the moment. Neil's just got to trust that the increasing number of people who know about this job isn't a security risk.

Their suites are in a row, on the floor directly above Riko's. Each suite is a bedroom and a lounge area with a bathroom. They probably could have fit all of them in a single suite, so Neil's not entirely sure why they have three, but he presumes that Ichirou is footing the bill for this particular extravagance. It's hard to remember that this hotel, while opulence for them, is a snub for Riko. His uncle, Tetsuji, is also in the branch family but he is Kengo's brother and as such has been invited to stay with the rest of the Moriyama family in New York. Riko doesn't count as direct family anymore.

Allison leaves them her access card, and points at Andrew. "Once this is done, we are square, and I never want to see you again."

Andrew mock-salutes her in return. They set up everything in one room without really discussing it. Luggage goes in a pile in one corner, insignificant things like clothes and personal hygiene on the back burner for now as they consolidate their plans and their gear. They'll be using Kevin's PASIV, which has been souped up by Matt, and Kevin immediately gets it out to pore over every inch of it. Nicky has a small crate of the Somnacin solution that they'll be using, which has Kevin fretting again; they haven't tested it as extensively as he'd like to and he's muttering to Andrew about the amount of sedative in it.

Speaking of which, somewhere else in the hotel, Allison will be slipping specific amounts of sedatives into Riko's food. It won't be enough to knock him out, because they don't want him to be suspicious, but they do need him to consider going to sleep in a timely manner, otherwise they won't have enough time for the job.

Matt, Nicky and Aaron will be staying topside, with Aaron monitoring their vitals, and Matt and Nicky keeping the room secure. That means weapons. Matt has a Glock, as the dream den requires its own security, and Neil is lending his gun to Nicky. He'd be dubious about how good of a shot Nicky is, but Nicky had turned it over, examined the safety and the clip, and slid it into the holster with a smoothness that implied that he at least knew his way around a gun, even if he didn't seem to particularly enjoy it.

Dan is hosting the first level, Kevin the second and Neil the third one, with Andrew going down all the way with him. "And if Dan and Matt don't get here in time?" asks Neil, and Kevin shoots him a scowl that almost makes Neil think that he's back to normal.

"Then Nicky will have to do it."

There's an ensuing silence that's not terribly encouraging, and Nicky gives them a weak smile. "I do know the map, at least."

Neil looks from Kevin to each of the cousins as the silence stretches. Surprisingly, it's Andrew who looks away from where he's been staring out of the window. "What they're failing to tell you is that Nicky struggles with large dreams."

"He wouldn't if he practiced," mutters Kevin.

"Struggles how?" asks Neil, steering the conversation back to the important point.

"Well," says Nicky. "Sometimes I forget to make sure all the right bits are there. It probably won't _collapse_ , but it might just. Move around a bit. The sedative will help though!"

"That's reassuring," says Neil in a tone that implies that it was anything but.

"But there's still time for Dan and Matt to get there," says Nicky hopefully. They're going to have to do the job either tonight or Saturday night when Riko is sleeping, which will give them around seven uninterrupted hours.

It's late afternoon now, and they're ready to go on the off-chance that Dan manages to get here in the next few hours but until then, they're stuck sitting around, watching Kevin obsessively clean yards of tubing. Neil's legs start to jiggle. It'd be too risky to go for a run now, on the off chance that Riko will come out and spot him. Aaron's barricading himself in the other room of the suite to talk to his girlfriend, and Andrew is busy covering up the fire alarm and wedging the window open so he can have a cigarette.

Neil passes a hand over his face as he considers his options, and eventually decides to join Andrew on the windowsill. He can feel his nerves starting to gather, pushing at the invisible wall he's built between himself and his feelings, and they're threatening to break through, and then he'll turn into a mess like Kevin.

Andrew doesn't turn his head to look at him, but he pulls his legs up to make room for Neil on the other end. Neil makes eye contact with his translucent reflection in the glass and reaches for the cigarette dangling loosely from Andrew's fingers. He moves slowly enough that there's plenty of time for Andrew to move if he wants to, but Andrew lets Neil steal his cigarette and inhale the smoke.

It settles him, an ingrained habit born from years of repressed anxiety, and he flicks the ash out of the window. The view is spectacular. They're high enough that the people scurrying below barely look real, but not so high that they're removed from the bustle of New York. He looks away to see Andrew watching him.

"What?"

"You're wasting a perfectly good cigarette," says Andrew, and Neil inhales once more before handing it back. Andrew's fingers are cool against his, and his feet are carefully far enough apart for Neil to slip his between them. Andrew lets the smoke waft between him, obscuring his face.

There's almost the illusion of privacy, that they could draw the curtains and it would just be the two of them in the window sitting in silence together, until Nicky speaks up: "If we're stuck in here, I'm ordering room service. Anyone else?"

Dan and Matt don't turn up that night. Nicky turns the tv on at some point, watching some movie he picked from the hotel's selection, and the rest of them stare at the screen in dazed distraction, not wanting to move from their spots because that would imply giving up for the night.

Kevin gets a text from Wymack around midnight and sits bolt upright. He skims it furiously. "They're out," he says, relief visible. "On their way here. We'll have to do this tomorrow but they were extracted smoothly."

And with that, the tension drains out of the room. Nicky lets his head drop onto the armchair. "Oh, thank God."

Neil and Andrew moved to the couch at some point, and now Neil lets himself sag back into it. The strain of the travel, the nerves, the uncertainty all catches up with him, and he's suddenly exhausted. He closes his eyes for just a moment, and then doesn't really feel like opening them again. Something soft whumphs against his hip and he reaches out to find a blanket. He pulls it up over himself, feeling someone else on the other end, and just lets himself go.

-

Neil wakes up alone on the sofa, and his eyes are on fucking fire. Neil groans – he's dealt with this before, but it's never less painful as he blinks copiously and peels the contacts from where they're stuck to his eyeballs. He drops them unceremoniously onto the coffee table as that pair are probably ruined now, and rubs at his eyes until the the dry, scraped feeling starts to lessen and he can open his eyes and look around properly.

The cooling sag on the other side of the sofa implies that Andrew left only recently, even though this is technically Andrew and Kevin's suite. Nicky is still curled up in the armchair, mouth agape and drooling slightly, and the bedroom door is closed. Neil knows better than to wake Kevin if he doesn't have to, so he scratches his stomach lazily, letting his body stretch out naturally. Even a few months ago, he would have never let himself sleep in such an exposed situation. But now, in his mind there is Andrew with his back against a door, standing guard.

He needs the bathroom, but it's occupied when he gets there so he knocks, and then leans against the wall, yawning. Steam billows out when the door opens and Andrew emerges, scrubbing at wet hair with a towel. He's dressed already, in his usual black ensemble; Neil doesn't quite know why he can tell the difference between Andrew's multiple plain black t-shirts, but it looks like he's exchanged it for a fresh one at least.

Neil lumbers in on autopilot. He's unpacked exactly nothing, so it's a good thing that there are supplies in the bathroom. He's in the shower and under the spray and back out again before he's awake enough to realise that he didn't bring any clean clothes in with him. When he looks at the puddle of clothes he'd stripped out of and left on the floor, he sighs. He's feeling nice and freshly scrubbed, and has no desire to put grubby travel clothes and last night's underwear back on.

The mirror is misted over, but Neil doesn't need it to see the scars across his body. He traces them with his fingertips idly; in this industry, most people have had some sort of injury, but not all of them are from the job. He wraps the towel around his chest as high as he can manage, but his burn still peeks out. He grits his teeth, and ekes the door open an inch or so.

Nicky is still asleep, the bedroom door is still closed and Andrew is reading a book on the sofa. Neil gnaws on the inside of his cheek for a moment in indecision before finally calling softly, "Andrew? Could you – Could you get me some clean clothes?"

Twisting his body on the sofa, Andrew looks over his shoulder, straight at him, and for a moment Neil thinks that Andrew's going to say something but to Neil's slight surprise, he doesn't. He just goes to grab Neil's duffel bag from the corner. He sends Neil another look, as if waiting for Neil to freak out about his belongings, and then unzips it. Neil watches Andrew root through for a shirt, a pair of jeans and some underwear and socks dispassionately. It's just a duffel bag these days.

When he brings it all over to the bathroom, Andrew stands outside and looks at Neil through the gap. "Show me."

"What?"

"Show me," says Andrew, again. "The truth."

Neil swallows. He's not _ashamed_ of his body, as such. It's just that they tell his life story so well. But then, he promised Andrew right at the beginning that he would tell him the truth, and this is a part of that. He leaves the door agape, and retreats into the bathroom. Andrew steps in quickly, locking the door behind them, and Neil feels silly hiding behind his towel like it's any sort of protection at all.

Andrew puts the clothes on the counter and stays next to the door, waiting. Neil slowly lowers the towel until it's wrapped around his waist instead. He realises that he's waiting for some sort of reaction; anyone who's seen Neil's scars recoils, but Andrew stands there impassively, letting his gaze rake over every detail.

Taking a few steps forward, Andrew raises his hand, letting it hover over Neil's skin as if, once again, waiting for permission.

"Go ahead," says Neil. Andrew touches the raised line across his ribs.

"My father teaching me how to fight," says Neil in answer to the question in the silence. When Andrew moves to the stab wound under that, Neil tells him about the time his father's men nearly caught him after he ran away from Evermore. The gunshot starburst, he got in the same encounter that ended with his mother dying. The burn across his shoulders is from before that, when he still lived with his father, who whipped a red hot poker at a boy who wasn't quiet enough.

The steam in the air dissipates slowly, until Neil's shivering slightly and Andrew's hand drops to his side. His body tingles all over where Andrew traced his fingertips and when he finally lifts his eyes to look Andrew in the face, Andrew is closer than he remembers him being just a moment ago.

Andrew looks into his eyes for a long moment. "Blue," he says.

"Truth," says Neil dryly.

Andrew reaches into his pocket with his other hand and pulls out his lighter, the one that doesn't light, and clicks it. "I suppose it must be," says Andrew. He clicks it again as if he doesn't quite believe that this is reality, and it still doesn't light. He slides it back into his pocket, and fingers the hem of his armbands instead before peeling both of them off.

There are indents of the fabric against Andrew's skin, but that's not what Andrew is showing him. It's the tiny scars across his forearm, white even against Andrew's pale skin. Andrew looks down at them for a moment, and then stuffs the armbands into his pockets.

"Truth," says Neil quietly.

"Don't get maudlin on me," says Andrew, looking up to see if Neil's eyes are still blue. They are, of course. "Yes or no?" Andrew lifts his hand again, and Neil nods. Still, Andrew waits until he says it out loud, and he lets his fingers rest lightly on Neil's bottom lip. Neil's mouth parts of its own accord; his tongue flickers against Andrew's fingers, and it's only because Neil's eyes are firmly fixed on Andrew that he sees the way Andrew is staring again. So, of course, he does it again.

A light flush appears across pale skin, so light that it might be the heat of the bathroom after a shower or a trick of the light or Neil's own imagination, but when Andrew drags his fingers back, he chases them forward until Andrew twists his hand and Neil presses a kiss into his palm before he cradles Neil's jaw, keeping him in place as he finally, finally looks up and kisses Neil.

Andrew's tongue mirrors the way his fingers ghosted across Neil's lips before he deepens the kiss. Neil tries to lean into it but Andrew's hand keeps him where he is as Andrew takes his time. "Yes," says Neil again when Andrew's hand slides down from his jaw to his neck eventually, and then his shoulders, his arms, and this time, he's touching everywhere, not just the scars.

Neil doesn't move his hands without Andrew's say-so, leaving them on the towel around his waist, but the fine hairs on Neil's skin rise where Andrew has touched as he strains to lean forward without toppling over. But Andrew is steadfast and unmoving as he maps Neil's skin under his hands, and swallows every gasp that drops from Neil's lips until he leans back and Neil finds himself panting.

Somewhere in his hazy mind, Neil knows that he's hard. He mostly treats arousal like an inconvenient bodily function, dealing with it in the shower if he has to and ignoring it the rest of the time. He can't remember if he's ever had it directed _at_ someone before, and now it's all too obvious as his towel has slid lower and lower down his hips.

When Andrew's hands settle on his hips, Neil moves in the direction they nudge him in until he feels cold tile against his back, and shivers. Andrew's body heat radiates off him, bridging the gap between them, and his hand moves under the towel. The skin on Andrew's palm is rough and his grip is tight on Neil's cock and Neil clutches at the hem of the towel until it's twisted into his fists and his knuckles strain with the effort of not moving.

The strain's got to be hard on Andrew: he keeps his body a strict inch away from Neil's, and it's not until Neil looks down that he realises that Andrew is not even remotely as unaffected as he seems. Andrew watches him, as he always does, takes in every twitch, every gasp, every minute reaction and makes Neil do it again until Neil comes, abruptly and messily, half into Andrew's hand and half into the towel.

"Andr–" Neil starts to say, but he's cut off with a bruising kiss that leaves his jaw aching. His knees wobble and he finds himself sliding down the tile, blinking in exhaustion and astonishment. Andrew looks down at him with an indecipherable expression, one hand held slightly away from his body.

They stay there for a beat, before Andrew goes to turn the sink on, turning his back on Neil and Neil gives himself a moment to pull himself back together and wipe himself down with the towel. He reaches for the pile of clothes and pull them on over his damp skin. He doesn't care if Andrew sees – Andrew isn't looking and besides, he was more than naked in front of Andrew just now.

Neil isn't really sure where to go from here, and he doesn't want to be selfish. "I can –"

"Get out," says Andrew. He's pulling his armbands back on, and makes eye contact with Neil through the half-misted mirror.

Neil nods, and wobbles somewhat unsteadily to the door, and waits until he's left the bathroom to let a smile cross his face.


	16. Chapter 16

When it's time to get started, Neil is eerily calm. There are a thousand possibilities running through his head, most of which end up with him dead at the end, but he enjoys this part of the job. His research and preparation is all done; there's nothing else he can do to increase his chances of success.

There's the thrill of the job ahead, the idea of pulling off something that no one else can, and nothing has gone wrong yet.

That, of course, does not last.

The moment they enter Riko's hotel room, they know that they have to change the plan. For one thing, there's two beds in the room, and a body in each of them. Kevin and Neil stop when they realise. Nicky, at the back of the group, stumbles into Matt and that causes a domino effect as he bumps into Dan and everyone else gets shoved forward – apart from Andrew, who doesn't budge even when Aaron falls onto his back – which ends with Kevin being shoved forward into the middle of the room.

Thankfully, neither body moves. As well as Allison's sedated food, they had waited until the lights in the room had gone out, and then gently pumped sleeping gas under the door, but it had only been a very small amount – and with two people in the room, it might have not been enough.

"What is it?" Nicky's voice wafts in a whisper from behind them.

"Riko didn't come alone. He brought Jean with him." Kevin's voice hitches just before he mentions Riko's companion. Neil recognises the name, but only from Kevin's stories. Jean was one of Riko's other teammates (in the broadest sense of the term 'teammate') and one of Kevin's friends (in the broadest sense of the word 'friend') and once Kevin left, Jean replaced him at Riko's side. Kevin hasn't spoken to Neil about it often, but the times he has mentioned it, he gets this pinched look across his face as his guilt for leaving Jean behind to Riko's dreams tears him apart on the inside.

There's a quick flurry of whispers: "What do we do?" "Shhhh!" "Who the fuck is Jean?" "Just move forward."

Everyone stops when one of the bodies shifts, rolling over in the bed. They're all looking to Kevin to make a decision, but Kevin is frozen in place. There's a twitch of movement on Neil's left, and he looks over to see Andrew in the dim light moving forward with the PASIV. He sets it down in the middle of the two beds, and starts unravelling the tubes. Neil takes his cue from him, and joins him, hooking the needles up and swabbing his own arm, and then everyone else filters in around Kevin.

Neil looks at Kevin, who's still staring at Jean, and then looks around at their motley crew, churning through options in his head. It's too late to run.

"Nicky. You're coming under with us. Give Aaron the gun."

Nicky frowns, but does as Neil says. "But–"

"You get to babysit Jean on the first level. Keep him entertained, keep him out of trouble."

Aaron looks startled by the gun in his hands, and Neil blinks, momentarily struck by how terribly different he is to Andrew.

A swish of the curtains breaks Neil out of it – Matt's drawn the curtains back, giving them a bit more light to see by, and he's also hooking up the thin line they've dropped down from their window in the room above; if things go wrong and they need to get out of there, it's better to have multiple exits out of the room.

Neil props himself sitting upright against Riko's bed, and feels rather than sees Andrew wedge Kevin next to him, with Andrew on his other side. Nicky and Dan are against the end of Jean's bed, and the PASIV is between all of them.

Nicky's eyes are wide, glinting in the streetlight, and Neil nods at him, the only reassurance he has for him. Dan looks confident, almost excited even. Kevin is internalising his panic, which is not exactly good but is – for Kevin, at least – a step towards normality. And Andrew is as unruffled as ever, and that reassures Neil. Andrew's hooded eyes boring into him are the last thing he sees before Aaron presses the button on the PASIV and he sinks into the dream.

**LEVEL I**

The dream is familiar. Neil's been down a few times now, and Dan is reliable. He looks around at where he'd chosen to start – at the edge of his section so that he can work his way back towards the centre – and breaks into a jog. The weather's overcast and swollen clouds roil across the sky threateningly, probably a reflection of the uncertainty that Jean brought into their plan.

It takes hours and hours to walk or run through New York, even the condensed version held firm in Dan's brain, but stamina isn't exactly a problem in a dream. Neil keeps up a brisk jog anyway. Seven hours in real time gives them over six days on the first level, but ideally they want as much time as possible in lower layers.

It's actually Dan who finds Riko first, which is fortuitous as Riko still doesn't know what she looks like. Neil looks at the shapes in the clouds, and hails a cab. He gets there third, after Kevin, who is pale but determined. While they're waiting for Andrew, Neil pulls on his first disguise of the job.

His hair turns black, and he gives himself a height boost. He checks his skin tone, and by the time Andrew is there, Neil looks Japanese. It's not anyone specific – Neil pulled the details from half a dozen different men – but then again, it's not meant to be anyone that Riko knows.

"He's in the station," says Dan, half a block away with a pair of binoculars to her eyes.

Neil nods, and straightens up – and falters when he sees a figure running down the street. It's Jean, followed by Nicky, who's making frantic gestures at them. He starts forward, wanting to intercept them before Riko can look around and spot Jean, and evidently Andrew and Kevin both have the same idea.

"What are you doing?" Jean nearly screams at them once they're within hearing distance.

"Jean," says Kevin, but Jean whirls on him.

"Are you crazy?"

Nicky can only make apologetic gestures as he finally draws level with them. "I'm sorry – I tried, but he figured it out right away."

Neil gives Jean a sharp look. He'd figured out that it was a dream already? He can see the number three etched on Jean's cheek, but even Riko doesn't seem to have figured it out yet. It hasn't started collapsing on them yet, at least.

"Jean, stop drawing attention to yourself," hisses Kevin, and Jean immediately straightens, goes to do what he's told, before realising that he's automatically obeying Kevin. He purses his lips.

The projections do stop staring at them creating a scene on the street though; Jean isn't the subject of the dream, so luckily him noticing isn't going to make the dream collapse, but if projections start doing strange things then Riko will notice and then things definitely will start to fall down.

"It is necessary," says Kevin, quickly, quietly. "We have been ordered. From above."

"Above Riko?" asks Jean, his face pale. "What –"

"You don't want to know."

They exchange prolonged eye contact. Neil thinks about it; it must be close on four or five years since Kevin and Jean have seen each other face to face.

"You left me," says Jean finally. His accent comes out thicker than he perhaps intends, and he swallows it down, his adam's apple bobbing with exaggeration in his throat. After looking around at all of them clustered around him, Jean adds, "You left me. With him."

"I know." Kevin's voice is raw. "I –"

"You're not sorry," says Jean. "Don't you dare be sorry."

Kevin nods, and steps back.

"How touching," says Andrew into the sudden silence. "Riko's leaving, by the way."

Everyone collectively swears, and looks back toward the station.

Kevin switches to French, breathlessly begging Jean not to do anything, not to alert Riko to their presence in his mind. A muscle in Jean's jaw twitches, and Andrew says, "Just shoot him and send him into limbo."

" _No,_ " Kevin and Jean say at the same time, then both look vaguely horrified that they had the same reaction.

"I'll figure something out," says Kevin quickly as he shepherds Jean towards one of the cars on the sidewalk. Andrew narrows his eyes; the next part of the plan involves Kevin and Andrew getting into separate cars, but it looks like he's not so keen on that anymore. Dan gets into the driver seat and Kevin manoeuvres Jean into the middle seat between himself and Nicky, which is going to have to do for now. They're running out of time: Riko's already out of the station.

Andrew and Neil get into their own car, a yellow cab, and Andrew zips through the New York traffic with Neil in the back. Dan's car is to tail them, but to stay out of sight. They pull up alongside Riko, and Neil opens the door, bowing like Kevin taught him. "Moriyama Riko-san? Moriyama-sama sent me for you."

Barely is Neil afforded a first glance, let alone a second glance, before Riko climbs into the car. Dan's decorated the inside of the cab deliberately; there are knickknacks scattered across the dashboard, an expired air freshener mingles pine fresh with the smell of stale cigarettes that permeates the battered seats. There's a used tissue stuffed into the door next to the handle. Instead of greeting him, Andrew cranks the heating up even higher. Riko's nose wrinkles in distaste at the entire affair, that this is his reception into the city.

And already, the Inception has begun.

Thankfully, the entire situation sets Neil up for speaking as little as possible, because his Japanese accent is just about passable. He hands Riko a piece of paper, his itinerary for the next few days.

"When will I see my brother?" asks Riko, oddly deferential.

Neil pauses. "Ah, Moriyama-sama is very busy these few days. He will be at the memorial, of course."

"Of course."

"Will you return to Evermore after this?"

Riko looks at Neil properly for the first time. "Of course. Why would I not?"

Playing this part requires careful balance on Neil's part. He's supposed to be a lackey, but one that is evidently trusted with family matters more than Riko is. "Ah," says Neil, hedging again. "We had heard that the Evermore trials had gone very successfully."

"They have." Riko is even more frosty than Kevin can be.

Neil nods understandingly. "Good, good. But you are still doing more of them?"

They're trying to make Riko feel as shunned as possible. His brother won't meet with him, he is in the shittiest cab in New York City, and apparently even the employees think that his life's work is a waste of time. It seems to be working, because Riko's eye twitches. And that's when Andrew pulls over to the curb with a screech, flinging both of them straining forward into their seatbelts.

"What–" Riko leans forward but then he sees the masked figures outside the window. The door opens and they bundle into the cab, two in the back, squashing Riko up against Neil, and one into the passenger seat.

Someone pushes a sackcloth over Riko's head and grabs Riko's arms, handcuffing them together, and then barks, "Drive!"

Andrew drives.

"Who are you?" gasps Neil, his voice quivering.

A good indicator that Riko is absolutely not entirely all there is the fact that his reaction to being kidnapped at gunpoint is to strain against his bindings, and snarl, "What do you want?"

Whoever is in the front seat laughs, loud and brusque. They also give Neil a thumbs up, so it's probably Nicky. "Wouldn't you like to know, ha?"

Neil raises an eyebrow at his terrible villain impression, and Nicky shrugs unrepentantly. The other two, when they pull off their balaclavas, turn out to be Kevin and Jean, which is probably why they're not saying anything lest it give them away. It's supposed to be Kevin and Dan, so Neil is left wondering where on earth she is, and why she isn't _here_. Kevin's face says 'trust me', and, frankly, Neil does not.

There's the sound of a phone dialling, and then Andrew says, "Hey. I've got the Moriyama you were looking for."

Neil wonders vaguely if he's got any hands on the steering wheel at all, or if the road is re-orientating itself to Andrew's wishes again. They drive for a while, punctuated by Riko violently protesting, Neil feebly offering money or information or pleas every so often, Nicky making what he probably thinks are threatening growls and, eventually, Andrew turning the radio on to drown them all out.

When they arrive, Riko gets yanked out of the car unceremoniously. Neil hurries after them, but at least he gets to don his own sackcloth and handcuffs to appear as much a hostage as Riko. He makes sure to slump into Riko when they're tossed into a room, and manages to get in a good elbow to his ribs; he might as well enjoy what he can. It's just a generic basement, much like Dan's dream den if emptied, but much smaller, and the concrete floor is cold and gritty. The sound of Riko struggling as someone ties their feet together too is satisfying though. Neil squirms, and makes himself comfortable.

"Where do you think we are?" asks Neil, playing up to the scared employee once they're locked in alone. Riko doesn't deign him with an answer.

The door bangs open; there's one set of footsteps. The sackcloths are ripped off their heads, and Neil blinks owlishly up. She's wearing a balaclava, but it's definitely Dan, which is a relief.

"The fuck?" she demands, looking from one of them to the other. "Who are _you?_ Where's Ichirou?!"

"I am _Riko_ Moriyama," snaps Riko, drawing himself up. Dan kicks his ankles out from under him before he can manage to stand.

"Fuck. FUCK," Dan screams in his face so loudly he recoils from her. She stalks out of the room and the door slams behind her, but they can still hear her yelling through the door. "You fucking MORONS, that's the wrong Moriyama! What the fuck would I want with this one?"

"No, no!" There's a voice, thin and high and... very recognisably Jean. Riko hisses, pale with anger and shock; of all people, he could never have expected Jean to betray him. Neil seriously hopes that this is part of the plan. He fucking hates it when Kevin changes things up without telling him. "He's the one I told you about. He's a Moriyama–"

"He's not the head of the family! What the fuck does this one do? Fuck all!" bellows Dan. She's probably enjoying herself massively.

"He'll know, you just have to ask him. Ask him!"

"Goddamnit Moreau, you'd better be right!" Dan sweeps into the room again, and kicks Riko squarely in the stomach when he tries to lunge at her. Damn. She's terrifying.

The rest of them barrel in after her, restraining Riko and Neil. "Wait," pleads Neil. "I don't know anything, I was just sent to collect him!"

They ignore him, and tie a chloroform soaked cloth over his nose. Well, Riko's is chloroform. Neil's is just wet. It takes almost five minutes for chloroform to knock someone out when inhaled; Neil pretends that it's kicking in after a few minutes, making his eyelids start to droop, sagging against the wall. Just before Riko passes out, they take the time to drop one last tidbit:

"You," says Dan. "Get the PASIV. We'll get some answers out of him if there are any to be found."

Just before he closes his eyes, Neil sees the triumphant flash in Riko's eyes.


	17. Chapter 17

**LEVEL II**

 

Neil is Neil again, and these white corridors are starting to look terribly familiar.

Kevin and Andrew stand across from him and he nods at both of them. It looks like the first level, the most simple, went reasonably well, all things considered. Kevin looks different. He hasn't changed himself like Neil can, but it's in his posture. He stands straighter, holds himself stiffer. His clothes are the crisp, all-black uniform of Evermore, down to the worn yet still polished combat boots. He's beaten the fear out of his eyes, replaced with an imperious chill, and he is an actor whose life depends on his act. This is Kevin before he left Evermore.

Jean and Nicky appear in the dream between blinks, and Jean blanches when he sees where they are and the clothes he's wearing. "You are bringing him back here? Into his own territory?"

This seems to be directed at Kevin, and Jean shakes his head violently, at a loss for words.

"Did the plan change?" asks Neil, ignoring them both, even as Kevin mutters under his breath in French, telling Jean to get a grip on himself.

"No." Andrew starts walking towards the elevators, and his outstretched arm jostles Kevin along to do the same. "Jean will watch Kevin when we go down, and Nicky will watch Jean." Neil thinks about it. It's actually a good idea; Andrew and Neil are the two most used to working with Kevin, balancing out his quirks and shoring up the gaps caused by his instability and they're the two heading down into another level. Jean is, presumably, also familiar with that and can keep an eye on Kevin. And, because he is still Riko's creature, having Nicky around to keep an eye on him is particularly useful.

They reach the elevators at the end. Neil had assumed that the stupid all-white corridors and chrome elevators in Kevin's mind palace with the stupid touchscreen buttons outside had been Kevin's idea of interior decorating, so it had been startling to discover that they are actually what Evermore looks like. He still thinks they're stupid.

Neil uses the mirrored inside to graduate his change into Nathan. Andrew watches him, as always. Kevin and Jean politely look away, as they would if someone were changing clothes, and Nicky, who's never seen him do this before, gawps delightedly. "That's amazing."

"Thanks," says Neil in his own voice before leaving even that part of him behind. His father has a lower, gruffer voice.

"When we arrive," says Kevin, repeating the plan for Jean's benefit since the rest of them surely know it inside-out by now, "Riko will be in the combat room. Jean and I will have apprehended Nathan Wesninski, the Butcher of Baltimore—" He pauses again to let Jean do another double-take as Neil-Nathan smiles wolfishly at him. "And we will interrogate him as to the discrepancies in his tithe and loyalties to the Moriyama family. We will convince Riko that he is doing an extraction on Nathan."

"You're taking him down another level?" asks Jean. "Three levels. This is madness."

"Feel free to sit this one out in limbo," says Neil-Nathan, and Jean scowls at him, but subsides.

Nicky raises his hand. "What about me? Andrew?"

"You keep Riko's subconscious off our back."

"Shit."

The elevator pings, and they all straighten themselves automatically, each remembering the roles they have to play. Neil-Nathan marches down the short corridor first, Kevin and Jean flanking him and Andrew and Nicky hanging back.

Neil's father is a much larger man than he is, and it's odd to match Kevin for height. It's odder still to push the door open and see Riko as shorter, slight, and not a threat. Riko, plopped into a dream in a familiar space, has defaulted to doing what he would normally be doing in the combat room, and is inspecting the PASIVs.

Despite the name, the combat room is another sleep chamber. It's much better furnished than the sparse beds and monitoring equipment they used on Neil in the research department; the beds are more recliners, with moulded cushions and back support for multiple hours of use. The warm lighting comes from wall-mounted lamps instead of the ceiling, so as to not blind and disorientate people lying back, and there's a line of mirrors that run around the whole room to make it look bigger.

A table in the middle of the room has a huge touchscreen computer embedded into it, and Neil can see an array of landscape designs across it. The whole room looks more like a spa experience than anything else. (Not that Neil has ever had a spa experience in his life, but he's certainly had to dream one up.)

"We have successfully retrieved him," says Kevin by way of announcing their presence. Riko looks up, and there's that slightly blank look a mark usually has at the beginning of a dream when they have no idea what's going on but they're just rolling with it.

"Mr Wesninski! Welcome," says Riko, a demented smile curling his lips.

Neil-Nathan grunts. "What's this about, boy?"

"You know what this is about," says Riko. "Your wife and your son and our money."

"Ohhhhh no," says Neil-Nathan, pressing his hammy hands onto the table. See, the Butcher's business doesn't have anything to do with Riko or Evermore, not really. "I don't answer to you, kid. You're as much part of the family business as I am, and you know it."

"Your son was sold to this branch of the family. To _me_ ," says Riko, his anger already fraying at the edges.

Neil realises, in a detached manner, that it wasn't just his father who got into trouble when his mother broke him out of Evermore; Riko and Tetsuji must have as well, for losing him. Neil's got a delicate balance to maintain. On the one hand, Nathan wouldn't be impressed with Riko at all, but there's got to be an undercurrent of fear of the Moriyamas in general underneath.

"He was sold to Lord Kengo," says Neil-Nathan, and lets his eyes flicker around as if to see if Kengo is going to appear. "And left in your custody. You lost him."

" _Your_ wife took him!" snaps Riko, leaning so hard on the table that the touchscreen discolours under his fists. "Perhaps, Nathan, you are harbouring them."

Neil-Nathan draws himself up and glares at Riko. "It is not for you to decide my loyalty to Lord Kengo."

Riko opens his mouth, perhaps to shoot back a cutting reply, when the door at the far end of the combat room slams opens, and in walks—

Riko Moriyama.

"Fuck," says Neil.

Behind him, Jean makes a noise like a pig being throttled, which Neil assumes is a similar sentiment.

And Kevin? His eyes are wide, his composure lost, which is great, just fucking great, because it's his fucking fault there's always a rampant projection of Riko wandering around his dreams anyway.

"A dream," breathes Riko, the air around him suddenly dangerous. "This is a dream."

"This _is_ a dream," agrees projection-Riko, and both of them swivel to look at the three of them, eyes narrowed and glittering.

Honestly, trying to fool just one Riko was hard enough; adding a second one who knows everything they know because he's literally a part of Kevin's brain is impossible, and projection-Riko is going to spill their plan any second now, because projection-Riko is an asshole who exists to haunt Kevin's dreams and turn them into nightmares.

Neil takes decisive action. He nearly thinks up a gun and changes it to a knife at the last moment. His aim isn't as good as his father's but hey, it's a _fucking dream_ , his aim is as good as he thinks it is, so he gets Kevin's projection of Riko right between the third and fourth ribs, spearing him so hard he smacks against the door and bangs it against the wall again.

Riko watches his other self die, and then turns back at them. He doesn't visibly move but suddenly the air is thick; it's a struggle to breathe or move and Neil has to concentrate to keep a hold of Nathan. There's a rumbling of the ceilings and walls like an earthquake, but one that is moving ever closer. The security alarms go off in the corridors, the blaring muted in this room, and Neil has no doubt that all of Riko's projections are on their way here right now. He hopes that Andrew and Nicky are prepared.

"Yes, I remember now," says Riko. "This is a dream. Jean, you betrayed me. To him? What can he offer you?"

Neil can't see him, but Jean doesn't say anything. He tries to think as his brain struggles for air. There is air, he reminds himself. This is a dream, there is plenty of air. He is Nathan Wesninski. There is air. Breathe. He is Nathan Wesninski. That's right. Riko still thinks he's Nathan. He's got to run with that.

He wheezes, pushing his words out despite the lack of breath. "Question is, what can you offer him, you fucking brat?"

Riko looks at him incredulously. "You dare speak to me like that? You turn on my family? You try and extract from me? My uncle invented dreamsharing! I am the best extractor in the world!" He turns to Kevin, and sneers. "You are good, I'll admit. But not good enough. Kevin was never so confident."

Neil can't help it. He laughs again in Nathan's booming voice. Riko thinks Kevin's a forgery. A forgery!

Unfortunately, this makes Riko's attention turn back to him. "You came down here to find my secrets, Nathan, and that was a mistake. You can see already what I'm capable of." The shuddering suddenly stops. The alarms switch off. Everything is eerily normal, aside from the dead body of Riko Moriyama bleeding all over the floor ten feet away.

Riko snaps himself upright. "No. You _will_ see what I am capable of." He gestures, and Neil-Nathan finds himself moving towards one of the recliners; the floor beneath his feet is rolling him forward, the dream obeying Riko's wishes.

He flails, and sees that Jean and Kevin are being propelled in the same way, and when they tip, the recliners move to meet them, the restraints clamping themselves around their limbs. Neil tries to think them open, but it's like there's a mental roadblock every time he tries. Riko's precision control of a dream is terrifying.

The PASIV appears next to them, suddenly with four tubes ready to go, and Riko picks one up and approaches Jean. He whispers something in Jean's ear, and Neil isn't close enough to hear, but he can see the pure terror in Jean's eyes.

He feels bad, a bit, for dragging him down here, but actually... well, the plan is working out pretty well. Riko definitely thinks he needs to interrogate Nathan, at least. They'll figure the specifics out later. Kevin probably doesn't think so, given the way he's struggling against his restraints.

Riko raises the needle, and suddenly every light and mirror in the room explodes, pitching them all into darkness and raining them with shards of glass. A shout from Riko implies that it wasn't his doing, and then there's the sound of scuffling, struggling. Is Kevin free? The fuck is going on? The building starts shaking again, awful cracking and tearing noises that sound more serious than before.

Belatedly, Neil thinks, _night vision goggles, night vision goggles_ , and they appear over his face. Andrew's here, freeing Kevin. Neil has no idea when he appeared or how or anything at all, and then the lights flicker on, despite the lack of bulbs, and off again, no doubt as the four of them in here struggle for control, and Neil's momentarily blinded.

"We're going." When Neil hears Andrew's voice in his ear, he starts. There's the coolness of Andrew's fingertips, working at the restraints around his wrist.

"No, wait." Neil keeps his voice low. Kevin and Jean are doing something to keep Riko distracted; he's not sure entirely what, but it involves the lights flickering a lot, most of the furniture flying, and Neil can feel the entire room starting to rotate as gravity starts pulling him towards the left instead of down towards the floor. "He thinks I'm the butcher. Take the other two, leave me and he'll take me under."

"No."

"Andrew. We can't pull out. We're sedated. We've got to go through with the plan, it's the only way. You know this."

"Not leaving you."

"Keep me safe from outside. Join the dream once we're under."

Andrew growls at him, but Neil feels him go. He exhales shakily. Nathan. He's Nathan. He gathers his breath, and joins the fray with a bellow. "What the fuck is going on? I hired you, Moreau, I expected you to get the job done."

The lights turn back on, properly this time, just as Kevin and Jean dash out of the door on the far side. Andrew is already nowhere to be seen. The room is a wreck, with half the recliners thrown towards one end of the room, Riko sprawled among them. The PASIV is a mess of tubing on the floor. The table is upturned and Neil winces internally at the shattered touchscreen. There's still broken glass everywhere and, most concerningly, there is a giant crack running across the floor that's three foot wide and just opens up into a black void. That's... not part of the plan.

Neil-Nathan strains against his restraints. "You fucker! Come back here, boy!"

Riko pulls himself to his feet. He swipes his arm across the air and Neil feels the very room lurch until the ground is under them again. He sees his fractured reflection in the mirrors and grimaces; a tug on his lapels smooths down his clothes, glass shards tumbling out of the folds; dust removes itself, and the static mess of his hair slicks itself back. Riko blinks, and the furniture moves to right itself, the table computer cracks running back on themselves until it's a single surface again.

He exhales. "Where were we? Oh yes. I have many questions for you, Mr Wesninski, not least how you got your hands on Jean." He pulls out a PASIV needle from the tangle, and it magically unravels itself.

"What about them?" Neil-Nathan jerks his head towards the door. "Looks like you've got bigger problems than me, kid."

Riko smiles him, with too much teeth and a gleam in his eyes as he slides a needle into Neil-Nathan's arm with brusque precision. He taps a finger to his temple, and then presses the button on the PASIV. "I can deal with them in my sleep."


	18. Chapter 18

**LEVEL III**

Neil checks his hands.

They change, hair sprouting across the knuckles as he watches, fascinated. He turns his palms over, and makes calluses appear and his handspan grow. He can't remember what they're supposed to look like.

A wind whistles across his face, blowing hair over his eyes, and he flicks it out. He's standing on the front step of a building, and in front of him is an expanse of greenery, grass and trees and bushes arranges to look both artful and natural, with a track running through it. He can't remember why he's here, or where _here_ is. He heads around to the nearest window of the building and looks at himself in the reflection of the glass.

A younger version of his father looks back at him, and Neil recoils. He doesn't look like this anymore, he doesn't think. He hasn't looked like this for a long while. He only looks like this in dreams.

That's right. A dream. That's why his hands change. That's why he got into the habit of checking.

Neil runs through a mental checklist. There are no projections around for some reason, no one for him to ask information from, and there's also no actual people around. He's also not freaking out. If there's anything Neil trusts in, it's his instincts, so the fact that he's not worried means that this... is what it's meant to be like.

He tries to remember. Why can't he remember? Once he knows he's in a dream, he can usually remember the mission, the objective. There must be something else.

Another figure appears in front of the building, and Neil darts behind a tree, just in case. Projections walk up naturally, as if they belong here: only other dreamers appear from nothing. It's Riko Moriyama.

He remembers now. They've been planning a job on him, and this must be it. Or maybe Riko's just found him. Why else would he be here at Riko's training track, by himself?

Neil checks his hands, and clenches them into fists when they change. He feels like he's losing his grip on reality; his mind keeps trying to coax him into forgetting that this is a dream. He peeks out from behind the tree again; there's a blank look over Riko's face, but he shakes out his limbs, and then starts stretching on a patch of grass.

There must be something, something making this different from a normal dream. Yes - sedative. Neil struggles through the fog in his mind, and finally, finally remembers.

They're three layers down. That's why it's so hard to keep a grasp on reality; they're deeper into sleep than anyone's been before. He's alone, but only here. There are others, keeping him safe, in previous layers. And Andrew's on his way.

Neil takes a deep breath. That's right. Andrew's on his way. And he remembers the plan now. He blinks himself into Kevin's body, and black combat clothes that match Riko's, and steps out. He mirrors Riko and starts stretching too.

This entire layer is based on one of Riko's favourite training simulations. The undergrowth is a maze, and this is a sandbox for them to come up with new ideas on how to manipulate dreams. Well, that's how Kevin had put it: Neil rather suspects it was Riko's playground in creating new ways in which to torture Kevin.

They finish their stretches in silence, until Riko stands. "Ready?"

"Ready," confirms Kevin-Neil. He slides the helmet on over his head, and pulls the visor down. The gun he pulls from the strap across his back is Kevin's preference of a mid-range, powerful enough to shoot an enemy from a distance but short enough to stick under his own chin and pull the trigger when Riko's won, but still toying with him. It's fucking depressing.

"Go."

Kevin-Neil stretches those long legs, and heads for the thickest growth of trees. The idea is that they each take one of the paths into the forest. They're the same distance, and the first one out the other side wins. What actually happens, of course, is that Riko cheats, so it's a good thing that Neil runs faster than Kevin. Once out of sight, he breaks into a sprint, kicking dust up on the track.

Nothing happens for the first minute or so, as Kevin had said would happen. Riko likes to take the time to speed himself through the maze, contracting distances to make his path shorter, but soon enough, the ground turns into mud, sludging under Neil's feet despite the clear, brisk weather and bright sun.

Neil reaches his first goal--a tree, tangled in amongst others--and climbs up until the leaves hide his presence. Kevin would never be caught up a tree, too dangerous to be trapped somewhere with only one escape route, so Riko won't think of looking for him up here. Plus, Andrew's here.

"'Lo," huffs Neil, slightly out of breath, and honestly just relieved he made it. The helmet limits his peripheral vision, and the gun keeps bouncing on his chest. It's different to just running.

Andrew's gaze is blank as Neil hunkers on the branch next to him, and Neil worries for a moment that Andrew's also forgotten that he's in a dream, until Andrew leans away from him. "If you think I'm kissing you when you look like that, you're mistaken."

Oh, right. He looks like Kevin at the moment.

Andrew leans against the trunk, huddled up; Neil eyes him for a moment and opens his mouth to say something, but then the tree starts to lean to one side as the ground churns, turning from mud into something more sinister. Andrew peers over the edge of the branch. "The floor is lava," he says. "Hope you're good at childish games."

"Never played it," says Neil. He can feel the heat emanating from below them.

"You get the general gist," says Andrew, waving his hand at the roiling lava that the forest floor has now turned into.

Neil sighs. "Don't suppose you could just turn it back?" he asks. That's why Andrew is here. Andrew's a point man, he _deals with things_. And as it happens, Neil is not exactly the most skilled at manipulating dream space. Oh, he can build a set maze, and change a few things on the fly, but mostly he relies on blending himself in with whatever surrounding has been constructed. Andrew, on the other hand, can keep Riko from wrecking the maze too quickly, leaving Neil to concentrate on being Kevin, and attack Riko back.

Andrew glances back at the floor, and the lava cools, rapidly solidifying into ashy black. The tree stops sliding.

"How come you have no problem doing this, but you can't dream your own dreams?" asks Neil, as they wait for the steamy smoke to dissipate.

"It's not your turn," says Andrew, but as Neil climbs down, he answers anyway. "This is destruction, not creation."

When Neil looks up, Andrew's face is as blank as ever. "In that case, let's destroy Riko's ass." He breaks into a run again and above him, the tree grows taller and taller, until it overlooks the rest of the forest.

The path ahead of him gets cut off, a tree falling with a crash, but Neil swerves off the path. This isn't Riko's maze, and so the path is just a diversion from the real way through. Riko tries half a dozen things, each more vicious than the last. Leaves turn into tiny daggers, whipping toward him with an artificial wind, and tree roots grow and reach for him. The leaves overhead knit together until there's almost no light seeping through, and still Neil runs with a single minded determination.

This entire plan hinges of letting Riko's mind trick himself. By spending most of the level apart, there isn't a person actually implanting an idea into his head. He's going to do it himself.

Neil knows that somewhere above him, Andrew is raining down blocked paths and broken branches, felled trees and puddles impossibly deep on Riko, so he concentrates on making it through the maze.

There's a rustle to his left, and Neil swings his gun up and around. He can't see for certain; the two paths never get too close, but he fires his gun anyway. There's another rustle, and an answering shot that barely misses Neil; he hisses, and trees start to converge, the spaces between them shrinking. He throws a glance behind him to check Riko isn't close, and manipulates Kevin's frame so that it fits through the gap, and keeps running.

On the other path, Riko's going to find dead ends where none have previously existed, Andrew's throwing obstacles at him constantly, and they've got to get Riko as frustrated and riled up as possible. Neil thinks about waterfalls, gushing water, raging rivers, how much he needs to pee, and the sky slowly turns grey, rainclouds welling up and splattering them with fat drops.

Riko's rage makes itself felt when the entire maze starts to rumble, the ground under Neil's feet moving and forcing him back like it did in the previous level. Trees collide, and Neil pushes off their trunks, trying to balance on the roots and moving from tree to tree to avoid the ground. He swipes at the water dripping off his visor, and grabs a branch to help his balance, and another shot rips through the undergrowth.

Neil yelps; it slices through his combat jacket and his bicep, and he tumbles; a branch smacks him squarely in the stomach and he falls into a bush. Neil wheezes for a moment as a thousand tiny branches stab into his back. He hopes Andrew did something really vicious in return. He checks his arm. It's bleeding, and it fucking hurts, but Neil grits his teeth. This is part of the plan, he reminds himself.

Riko's got to struggle for this win. It's got to be the hardest win he's ever had.

Somewhere in the far distance, there's a sound, not unlike the toll of a gong. It's muted, but it seeps into the very atmosphere of the dream, and once Neil hears one, there's another than follows, slightly higher in pitch. Neil lurches to his feet. That's the sound of the countdown, the deadline for the kick.

Somewhere, on the surface, Aaron will have fitted them all out of with earplugs and is syncing a piece of music. The formulae they're using has left inner ear function intact, so even in their sleep, even three layers down, the bass filters through to him. Neil's got to finish this race and kick Riko out of the dream before the end of this song.

Neil picks his stick up again and pushes himself toward the finish line. The rain gets heavier, until his visor is one constant blur of water. The darkness makes the way difficult to see, and Neil is thankful he's gone through this maze with Nicky so many times. He wends his way between two trees, a gap impossible for Riko to know was there, and takes a moment to cement his forge, before getting back onto the path. _Thump_ , goes the next note, hanging in the air.

The finish line is in sight. Neil raises his gun and sprays off as many bullets as he can in the direction he knows Riko will come from. There's a snarl, some vicious swearing in Japanese. _Thump_. The last stretch of the path is clear, the forest left behind them, and Neil can hear Riko coming up behind him.

"You were stupid, Kevin. You don't have any bullets left!"

Neil looks down automatically, checks his gun. That can't be true; it's a dream, there are as many bullets as he wants. But the moment he brings it up, the cartridge disappears from his gun and his hand closes over empty air. Riko's work. He imagines it back, but Riko keeps stripping parts off his gun and in the distraction, he shoots Neil straight through the back of the knee.

Neil screams, his agony completely unfeigned. Oh fuck, that hurts. So much. Riko shoots the other one and Neil collapses to the ground, shoulder hitting the ground at an awkward angle and sending a jolt of pain up his shoulder as well. _Thump_.

Riko slows to a jog as he approaches, satisfied. He looks a mess. He's pushes his visor up, probably because of the rain and darkness, but there's mud all over his clothes, branches and bits of leaves stuck everywhere, and his uniform is torn all over and completely shredded across one arm. If Neil weren't in so much absolute pain, he'd admire Andrew's work.

This is it. One thought anchors Neil in the midst of all this pain: this is the moment of inception. He can't feel his feet, and blood is soaking through his trousers, but he unbuckles his helmet with shaking hands, and pulls it off Kevin's head.

No, not Kevin's head.

Riko stares, stunned, as he looks down at Ichirou Moriyama. Ichirou, in his dream, his toughest challenge yet. Ichirou, with sweat soaked hair plastered to his skull, bleeding out at the kneecaps and unable to do anything but look up at him. Ichirou, with the number two tattooed on his face.

Neil lets Riko take in his last forgery, lets him stare for a good long time at his brother, felled and beneath him. Riko reaches out toward him, as if he can't believe what he's seeing and then the last note rings in the air, and their time is up.

This is what Riko needed to see, to think, to know: that he could be greater than Ichirou.

Up over Riko's head, Neil can see one tree, taller than all of the others, and a figure all in black perched on a branch throwing himself off a tree. He disappears from the dream.

With a terrible crack, the ground beneath them gives way, splitting away from the running track into a sheer drop, a cliff created into the maze. Neil sits up, his legs screaming from the pain, grabs Riko's outstretched arm, and rolls them both over the edge.

In a normal dream, Neil could shoot himself and he'd wake up when he died in a dream but when they're sedated like this and death in a dream means ending up in limbo, a kick is the only way to get out of a dream before the Somnacin runs out. The sensation of falling makes a dreamer wake up, and Neil feels the swooping feeling fill his stomach, and he falls awake a layer up, back in the body of Nathan Wesninski.

Beneath him, Neil's recliner lurches; Kevin was meant to rig explosives on the floor below them, set to go off at the same time so that they ride a series of kicks back up to the first layer to wait out the rest of the Somnacin time, and he can feel the floor giving way already.

There's still a phantom pain in Neil's knees, but when he sits up to rub them, he frowns. Andrew dropped out of the dream first—he should have unhooked himself from the PASIV and disappeared out of the room before Riko could wake up, but Riko's eyes are fluttering open and Andrew is still there.

Shit. The ground beneath them heaves, and parts of the floor start falling away, whole chunks of concrete falling through. Neil hurriedly unstraps himself, torn between keeping his front and flying to Andrew, but the floor underneath Riko's recliner suddenly cracks, the entire recliner dropping straight through the floor and Neil watches in relief as Riko's eyes roll back into his head and he falls again, and vanishes out of the dream into the first layer. As soon as he's gone, Neil leaps out of the recliner and over to Andrew, his Nathan skin melting away as he does so.

"Andrew!" There's no answer and Neil wavers for a moment as the floor creaks ominously under them. He doesn't want to touch Andrew without his say-so, but there's no response and the entire building is going to go in a second.

Neil grabs Andrew and the PASIV he's still hooked up to and pulls him away from the hole in the floor, and promptly drops the PASIV in shock. There, on the front of Andrew's shirt, is a dark stain, spread halfway across his torso and down his jeans. Neil touches it and his fingers come away red. Shit, shit, shit.

The door bursts open and it's Nicky. "Neil! The others have gone! Come on!"

Neil fumbles for a pulse, his fingers shaking. "I can't. Andrew got shot when we were in the dream, he's gone."

"What?!" Nicky has to yell—the floor between them is crumbling fast.

"Limbo," says Neil. "I'm going down after him. I'll find him and bring him back. You go!"

Nicky looks terrified, like there's a thousand things he wants to say, but all he does say is: "Bring him back." With that, he turns and leans back until he teeters over the edge, falling into the hole of the floor and giving himself the kick. Nicky vanishes.

Neil hooks both his arms under Andrew's armpits and pulls him to the edge of the room. "I'm coming for you," he mutters, and dreams up a gun.

Neil inhales. Exhales. "Neil Josten. Andrew Minyard. Dream. Limbo. Check your hands," he says, hoping to anchor himself to reality. And then he shoots himself.


	19. Chapter 19

**LIMBO**

Everything hurts.

Neil groans, and peels his cheek off the cold ground. It feels like he fell, smack into the ground, but he doesn’t remember falling. He doesn’t remember much of anything, actually. His joints ache, like the day after too much exercise, and his knees hurt especially for some reason.

He teeters when he stands, and frowns as he tries to swipe at the fog in his mind. He’s sluggish, he knows. He remembers being quicker than this. But he can’t remember... how.

There isn’t much around him. A light mist hangs in the air, much like in his mind, and the ground stretches on forever until it disappears into the distance.

Is he dead?

Neil turns in a circle unsteadily, and then suddenly behind him there’s a girl.

“Hello,” she says, and Neil is so surprised he tries to simultaneously inhale and scream, and ends up making a strange sort of ‘hrrrk!’ sound.

The girl is around the same height as him, with shoulder length hair, notable only because the last two inches of it are in pastel colours. She’s wearing a summery dress and a matching cardigan, and Neil stares because he doesn’t know of any girls who look like this. They don’t really... exist in his sort of life.

Of course, he can’t actually remember his life at the moment either.

“Hello,” he says back, and his voice fluctuates, croaking. Does he normally sound like this? He feels like he’s too old for his voice to be changing still. He clears his throat, and tries again. “Hello. What do you want?”

He winces slightly; that came out ruder than he intended. But he’s a wary person, he thinks. There must be a reason he’s so suspicious.

“You’re Neil,” she says.

“Yeah. How do you know that?”

She smiles, and Neil instinctively takes a step back from her, but she doesn’t do anything aside from stand there, her dress swinging slightly in the breeze.

But there isn’t a breeze. Neil frowns. That’s important, he thinks. He has to hold onto that. There isn’t a breeze.

“I’m Renee,” she says. She sounds so calm and matter-of-fact that it puts Neil’s hackles up. “He’s been waiting for you.”

“Who has?” Neil’s voice is sharp.

“Andrew, of course.”

“Andrew,” breathes Neil. The name resonates in his head like a soft bell. He remembers: the weight of eyes on his back; cool fingers on his; the smell of cigarettes. A lurch in his stomach like he’s about to fall, but he’s on solid ground. Warm lips on his own.

Renee is watching him like she knows he can only remember wisps of memory. It’s not pity, just knowledge. Neil shivers, and huddles into the black jacket he’s wearing. Andrew gave him this jacket. No, it’s not his jacket. It’s Andrew’s.

“Let’s go then.” He waits for Renee to turn and start walking in a direction before he falls in beside her. Neil clings to every little scrap of information that fights through the blankness in his mind, and hoards them close to him. He’s confident that he’ll start linking up the important threads soon.

Neil’s body still aches, but walking is good for working out the stiffness. He still can’t remember why his knees hurt, but there doesn’t seem to be anything actually wrong with them, and Renee doesn’t say anything about the way he shakes them out every so often.

In fact, she doesn’t say anything at all, she just keeps walking in a straight line through the empty space, and it’s completely unnerving Neil.

“Who are you, again?”

“I’m Renee. Andrew’s my friend.”

Neil can’t be completely sure, but: “I thought I’d met all of Andrew’s friends.” A pause. “He doesn’t have many.” It’s not a judgement, just a thing that Neil is somehow sure of.

“We don’t see each other very often,” says Renee. “He spends a lot of time in places I can’t go anymore.”

Neil mulls that over as they keep walking. “Are you dead?”

Renee laughs, a little tinkle of a sound. “No. You’re very calm if you think I’m a ghost.”

“Are you — imaginary?” Neil doesn’t know why he said that.

She beams at him as if he’s said the most clever thing. “Of course I’m imaginary. But why on earth would that mean I’m not real?” Her smile grows sharp, her eyes suddenly wide and wild and she suddenly looks so dangerous that Neil inhales, startled to a halt. And at the end there — her voice, it changed. She sounded just like — Andrew.

“You’re a projection. You’re one of _Andrew’s_ projections,” says Neil. The realisation is so enormous that his feels like his chest is exploding. Andrew _doesn’t have_ projections.

Renee hadn’t stopped walking; now she looks back at him and all vestiges of Andrew are gone. “You must have a lot of questions.”

It takes Neil a moment to catch up with what she’s talking about. If Renee is one of Andrew’s projections, then she’s part of his mind. She knows everything about Andrew. Neil could perform an extraction right now, just by asking her questions. “I do. But I’ll ask Andrew when I see him again.”

He gets the impression that Renee approves. She turns and carries on walking, anyway.

Neil loses track of how long they walk for. He feels tired, in a vague sort of way, but he doesn’t get more tired.

The mist seems to be getting thicker.

Neil keeps walking.

And walking.

He slows.

Renee is in front of him. Who is she again?

“Where are we?” asks Neil. The mist swirls around them, as if threatening to swallow them whole.

Renee looks at him with a concerned glance. “Limbo.”

“Limbo,” repeats Neil.

“You’re forgetting.”

“I’ve forgotten,” says Neil honestly.

“I’m taking you to Andrew.”

That’s right. “Andrew. Limbo. You’re Renee. This is a dream. Check your hands, Neil,” says Neil, half to himself. He looks at his hands, and they’re thicker than he remembers them being.

“That’s better. Come on, we’ve still got a way to go.” Renee holds her hand out to him, and Neil stares at it with a vague sense of horror.

Renee wiggles her fingers, and laughs at him not unkindly. “The mist is going to be too thick to see through soon.”

Neil gingerly lets her hold his wrist. “Can’t we move any faster? I can dream us up a car.” He kicks himself for not thinking of it earlier, but, well, it seems like the fog is only now slowly seeping out of his brain into the air around them.

“It’s time, not distance,” says Renee. “Safer this way.”

Neil actually understands that. Andrew must have manipulated his dreamspace so that it takes a set amount of time to reach him instead of a specific distance and it’s so clever that Neil wonders why no one else has done it before. “But Andrew doesn’t dream.”

“If he didn’t dream, how would I be here?” asks Renee.

She’s the most self-aware projection Neil’s ever met, and he’s sure that this is another example of Andrew’s ability. He admits, “I don’t know.”

Renee hums, and doesn’t press further.

They keep walking.

“So, Neil. Who do you think would win a fight between a shark with legs or a lion with gills?”

“What?”

“You’ll forget again if we don’t keep talking.” Renee’s voice floats back to him with a touch of laughter in her tone.

Neil has to wonder if the actual Renee is anything like this, and how accurate Andrew’s projections are. “About a shark with legs or a lion with gills?”

“About anything, really,” says Renee. “But you don’t want to talk to me about Andrew, so I thought something completely different would do.”

Neil ponders it seriously for a moment — after all, it depends on if they’re on land or not, since a shark with legs still can’t breathe above water — and then shakes his head. “Tell me about you. About Renee. Like I said. I thought I’d met all of Andrew’s friends.”

Renee smiles at him. “We met on a job. Different jobs, actually. We were on two teams hired for the same target.”

“Awkward.”

“We decided to merge the teams to create one extraction time frame. More plausible than the mark having two strange dreams in close proximity.”

“Did it work?”

“It wasn’t pretty, but just about. That was one of my last jobs though; I don’t run extractions anymore.”

There are people, Neil knows, who leave the dreamsharing world. It’s unfathomable to him, to leave behind a space where anything is possible, as long as he thinks about it hard enough. He trails his fingers through the heaviness around them. It doesn’t dissipate around his fingers like real mist, but clings to him like tiny tendrils of spider silk instead. “What do you do now?”

“Dream therapy.”

Neil must must have physically reacted without him realising, because she laughs at him without even having to look back at him.

“I use the dreamsharing technology in a different way. I use it as a safe space for people to explore their thoughts and memories.”

“That sounds... complicated.” Actually, it sounds like the sort of thing that Neil, who doesn’t put much stock in therapy the normal way, would be more likely to gouge his eyes out than participate in.

“It is,” says Renee. “But so is stealing something out of someone’s mind.”

“That’s different. I’m not changing anything in their mind when I do extractions. I’m not actually stealing anything either. They don’t lose anything, I just get it too.”

Renee tsks at him. “And what about when you put something in?”

“When you put... something in?”

“A thought. An idea.”

“Inception,” says Neil, the word forming in his mouth before he even realised he knew what it was. “That’s what we’re doing now. Inception.”

“Complicated,” says Renee, and it sounds like Andrew mocking him.

“This isn’t a normal job.”

“They never are.”

Neil stops, or tries to, because Renee is still leading him by the wrist; she’s much stronger than she looks. Her dress is moving more now, flapping around her legs even though there’s no wind.

“You know,” he says.

Renee looks back at him, but the mist is so thick that it covers her face now and Neil can’t see her expression.

Neil’s heart is suddenly hammering in his chest. “You _know_. But - you’re Andrew. I mean, you’re a part of Andrew. So - Andrew knows about the—”

“Come on, Neil,” says Renee suddenly, cutting across his words, and then she pushes away, dragging him behind her. She kicks her feet up into a run and Neil follows. Neil can run faster than this, but he’s still got his arm pulled out in front of him so he’s loping along instead.

He can’t see any of her now; the mist is almost solid, a strange temperature-less swirl that tickles his face and his neck. All he has to go on are her fingers around his wrist. They run until Neil is out of breath - no, not out of breath because this is a dream, he can’t get out of breath. It’s the mist, stealing the dream air out of his lungs.

He panics, thinking that he’s going to forget again and then he’ll be lost and confused, running through an opaque landscape with a girl whose fingers are iron around his wrist. Except he doesn’t. In fact, he remembers.

Neil clings to his re-found thoughts, running his mind through them like fingers rifling through a stack of paper as he strains to breathe. There’s Kevin, and Dan and Matt. There’s Aaron, and Nicky. There’s Riko, and Jean, and Ichirou. And, of course, Andrew.

They’d managed to complete the third level, he and Andrew, but Andrew had died in the second. That’s why Neil has to find him here in limbo.

So lost is Neil in his thoughts that when the hand around his arm suddenly lets go, he stumbles. “Renee?”

His voice is muffled in the mist, and she doesn’t answer. She’s gone. Neil cautiously inches forward. He doesn’t turn, because if he turns his body then he’ll lose the direction he was going in. He just carries on walking.

All at once, he walks out of the mist, as if there’s some invisible wall holding it all back, and once Neil’s stepped out of it and looks behind him, it’s gone, as if it were never there at all. Well. It’s not as if Andrew’s going to be behind him, so Neil doesn’t bother himself with that.

He looks ahead, instead. The landscape isn’t bare anymore. The ground beneath Neil’s feet is still smooth, but then there are pebbles, and the texture of concrete. There’s no road, but Neil can see buildings in the distance, tall and grey. They look like concrete skyscrapers, derelict and crumbling. Some are just piles of rubble.

Neil breaks into a run; a proper run, this time, and heads for the tallest building he can see.


	20. Chapter 20

Andrew's forgotten.


	21. Chapter 21

Distance and perspective has no meaning in limbo. Neil pounds his feet against the concrete and feels the impact thump all the way up from his ankles to his chest, but the buildings still seem so far away.

He ages, he thinks. There’s no way to keep track of time here, and it’s all relative to reality anyway, but it feels like time has passed. Certain things seem more like reality than ever. Neil finds himself pulling at his shirt as sweat plasters it to his chest and back, and his thighs start to ache. He’s startled when he reaches up to wipe at his face too, and there’s the coarse scrape of beard against his hand.

The temperature has started to drop, gradually, gradually, and Neil doesn’t even notice until his breath starts to hang in the air, little puffs that disperse as he runs through them. His hair straggles further and further into his eyes until he gets tired of shaking it back, and then he’s startled again when he discovers it’s now long enough to tie back.

He keeps running. Neil doesn’t know how to give up.

When Neil finally reaches the first building, he slows to touch it. From a distance, the buildings looked like they were all clumped together, like a city block, but now he’s here, he can see that they’re spaced apart erratically; the next closest is another run away. Neil shivers, and breaks into a jog again. He passes more buildings and a sinking thought forms in his mind, weighing down his heart and his ankles.

He ignores it, like most things he doesn’t want to have to face, until he’s here, at the tallest building, and he knows already that this isn’t where he’s going to find Andrew.

It’s a teetering skyscraper with cracks riddled through. Hunks of it are missing and the windows are empty. It doesn’t feel like a building anymore. He doesn’t know how to verbalise it, but it’s like it’s just an empty husk of concrete that’s been abandoned for years and years. A barely formed thought could tumble it, despite how solid and cold it is beneath Neil’s hand. It doesn’t even have a shadow.

This entire landscape is like a history book of Andrew’s mind as long as someone manages to read it, and now Neil knows with a horrific certainty: Andrew’s forgotten.

The tallest building is the oldest one still standing, the first thing Andrew created here. Nothing else compares. It’s a bad sign, he’s sure of it.

Neil runs up the tower. He knows what he’s looking for now, and he won’t be able to find it running around on the ground. The stairs winding up the building are strangely spaced apart and run mechanically around the edge of the building, as if it was only ever meant to be empty, and the stairs were an afterthought. There isn’t even a door at the top of the building, just a hole between the top step and the roof.

It's practically arctic when Neil steps out, even though there's no wind. The drying sweat on his back makes him shiver, and Neil thinks up a jacket; it comes so easily here, even more so than in a normal dream, as if fabricating something out of nothing is easier than anything else. It’s Andrew’s jacket that materialises over his arms, the shoulders a bit wide for him and the hem an inch too short.

Neil leans over the edge of the building, and even though he's never feared heights, there's still a momentary giddiness from being so high up, so exposed.

There are other buildings scattered into the distance, sprouting out of the landscape like spikes, and when Neil squints, it confirms what he's been thinking. The newer the building, the shorter it is. Andrew's been losing his ability to dream over time. Which means that he won't be on the top of any of these buildings, he'll be down there somewhere by now, perhaps –

A building tumbles. Neil jerks back; the sound it makes is loud, a thundering crash even from this far away. It's disproportionately loud, and doesn't make logical sense, like everything else in here. Neil watches as a tower collapses straight down into rubble as if someone had set an explosion right at the base and sent the whole thing down, but there's no smoke, no dust, it just... crumbles.

Neil's heart is in his mouth. That's Andrew. He would bet his life on it. He _is_ betting his life on it. He turns, and dives down the stairs again. He could dream himself down, but Andrew's made limbo his world for now and Neil doesn't want to risk changing it. He doesn't know how this Andrew will react. And so he runs, again.

He leaps down the stairs at three, four, at a time, and then out towards where he saw the building fall. He was right; from the ground, there's another one building in his eyeline. He'd have never seen the crash from down here. Once he wends around it, he can see the pile of rubble and in it, a speck. That's Andrew.

That's Andrew. That's Andrew. The thought pumps through Neil's mind as he runs. He's not subtle; running as fast as his legs will take him, flapping jacket, the only moving thing for miles around.

Andrew turns his head, watches him approach. His expression is undecipherable from a distance, and even more discouraging as Neil gets closer. It reminds Neil of Andrew when they had first met, but worse. His eyes are sharp and seeing but glazed over at the same time. He watches Neil run closer and closer with eyes narrowed. He raises his hand to his mouth, and the cigarette there barely exists, barely a wisp of a thought.

"Andrew," says Neil, as soon as he's able to. His voice hands, too-loud, in the air, like that building falling.

"Am I." Andrew doesn't even sound curious.

Neil falters. Fuck, he'd feared this, has done so since he reached the first building, but he still hasn't thought of a way to deal with it. "Yes. Andrew Minyard. You don't remember anything, do you?"

Andrew tips his head.

Neil barrels on. "You can't remember anything. You've been here for as long as you can remember. You can't make buildings anymore. You can barely make your cigarette anymore."

It's not, as far as introductions for amnesiacs go, the best or the most gentle or the most subtle. But Andrew is not a man to admit his weaknesses; if Neil asks him questions, he'll just evade them. He won't show that he's curious, that he cares about knowing anything, and at this point, Neil isn't sure he cares at all. So he's going to have to put it out there for Andrew to see first.

“You’ve been running for a long time,” says Andrew, his voice gravelly, as if he hasn’t used it in a long time. Neil blinks, and falters. Andrew lowers his cigarette, and it disappears. “Did I confuse you? I thought we were pointing out the obvious.”

There’s no recognition in his eyes, and in fact there’s... something else. Something Neil’s never seen before. Maybe this is what he was like before Neil, before Kevin. He’s so much more closed off that Neil wonders for a second if this is his Andrew at all. Something like guilt twists in his stomach at the thought of his own betrayal.

Neil looks at Andrew, who stares flatly back at him. There's a weariness that's sunk into his face. He's aged too, but not like Neil has.

Neil’s hair has grown as it would with the passage of real time; his hands are more gnarled than before, and he can see that the muscles on his legs are defined to the point of distortion.

Andrew is not like that. He still looks like he did one level above, a lifetime ago, but it's not about vanity or clinging to his looks. It’s like... It’s like he’s never thought that he would survive. He doesn’t have an image of himself, older.

Neil swallows, and thinks of a cigarette lighter. A heavy one, brassy with a brushed metal finish. Andrew’s lighter. “This is yours,” he says, and holds it up; he practically has to shove it into Andrew’s hand to get him to take it. Andrew’s had that lighter for longer than he’s known Neil; hopefully it’ll trigger some sense of familiarity.

Turning it over in his hands, Andrew flicks the lid off with his thumbnail, and tries to light it. A flame flares. The corner of his mouth pulls down, as if he knows it’s not meant to do that, but he can’t remember why he knows that.

“You always remember everything,” says Neil softly, “But now you can’t.”

Even as he’s saying it, Neil is only now starting to realise the enormity of it. Andrew has an eidetic memory; he remembers everything, regardless of whether he wants to or not. Unlike everyone else, Andrew’s never had the sensation of forgetting something, even something small and now to lose _all_ of it must be... terrifying. Andrew’s experiences shape who he is as a person. Without that, he’s like... like that tower that Neil climbed, with its pretence at being real. Andrew is like that empty husk, ready to crumble away.

If he’s freaked out by Neil’s guesses, he doesn’t show it, he just hunches his shoulders against the cold, and as if responding to him, the temperature drops again. Neil frowns; there’s something there that he should pick up on—oh.

He looks at Andrew, sitting on a pile of rubble that, moments ago, was the top of a building. Andrew’s scared of heights, he only subjects himself to them because they make him feel something, and now he can’t even have that, because the buildings won’t stay up under the crumbling of his thoughts. But the temperature, that’s not a material thing, he doesn’t need much control to change that. And cold is a feeling.

“There must be easier ways to feel.”

Andrew looks at him from the lighter, the frown on his face more evident now. Another thing that’s familiar to him, but he can’t quite remember. “Who are you?” he bites out eventually.

“Neil Josten. We work together,” says Neil, and climbs up the pile of rubble until he’s next to Andrew.

Andrew clicks the lighter sharply, and a flare of fire illuminates his face. “You’re lying.”

“Yeah,” says Neil. “I do that.”

He gestures at the patch of concrete next to Andrew. “May I?”

Andrew acquiesces with a dismissive sweep of his arm, but Neil doesn’t move. “Yes or no?”

“And if I say no?”

“Then I won’t.”

Andrew clicks the lighter a few more times, watching intently each time as it lights, and Neil stands, and waits. Finally: “Yes.”

Neil perches next to him, keeps both his hands in front where Andrew can see them, and wills the urge to jiggle his leg to stop. He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t want to freak Andrew out, and he doesn’t want to dump information on him either. Knowing Andrew, he won't believe it anyway.

Andrew flips the lighter closed after a while, evidently satisfied that it lights every time he tries, and looks at Neil. “You ran very far to come and sit next to me in silence.”

“It wasn’t that far,” says Neil. “It just took a long time.”

“You could have walked instead,” says Andrew, and Neil can’t help but sit up a little straighter, because that’s a sign, the first sign, that Andrew knows about the time/distance test his mind has set up.

“I couldn’t,” says Neil. “If there was any possibility I could have got here sooner, I would have.”

“And what’s so special about here?”

“You’re here.” He doesn’t want to tell Andrew what their relationship is, because he doesn’t want Andrew to force his image of himself into that when clearly he has no recollection of it. He needs Andrew to come to that conclusion by himself.

Of course, Andrew’s not stupid. He studies Neil again with narrowed eyes. “You said we _work_ together.”

“Among other things,” says Neil.

A moment’s pause: “That’s a lot of stubble burn.” The mocking bite to his tone is almost familiar.

Neil’s hands go up to his chin; he’d almost forgotten about that. He tries to imagine himself with long hair and a beard, and doesn’t really think it’s a very good mental image. “I don’t normally look like this.

“Mostly, it’s this.” He thinks of himself in reality instead; it takes a moment to remember what colour his hair is dyed now and forges himself as that. It’s strange. In this vast concrete wasteland with nothing but the two of them, it’s easier for Neil to be truthful than ever; he thinks again, this time of himself with his auburn hair and blue eyes, which no one else has seen for so many years now.  “And sometimes, it’s like this.”

“That’s new. A man who changes his shape.” says Andrew with a detached voice. He looks out around them, and brings a hand to his mouth as if by habit, but no cigarette materialises. “I always thought that death would be... more interesting.”

“This isn’t death. It’s a dream.”

“Pinch me,” says Andrew sarcastically. That’s good; sarcasm is practically a sign of emotion, coming from Andrew.

“It’s a dream, and you’re trapped in it because you died–”

“Ah, so it’s a dream and a death. The best of both worlds,” says Andrew, and waves his hand as if to survey his kingdom, from which he rules from his throne of rubble.

“–and I came down after you.”

“And here you are.”

“And here I am.”

Andrew doesn’t say anything else, just lapses into silence. Neil sits, staring out into the distance, and watches Andrew out of the corner of his eye. Andrew tries to smoke the non-existent cigarette three times before he finally scowls, and clenches his hand into a fist.

“You’re not doing a very good job at taking me back,” says Andrew. “This is a terrible rescue.”

Neil blinks, a slow flutter of eyelashes, and he quietly says the thought that’s been forming in his head since he sat down next to Andrew. “I didn’t say I was going to bring you back. I said I came down after you.”

Andrew tips his head. At last, a spark of interest, even if it is morbid. “You want to live your life out in a dream. _This_ dream?”

“Just because it’s a dream–”

 “Doesn’t mean it’s not real,” finishes Andrew, his voice hoarse. He sounds surprised that he remembered the rest of the line.

Neil smiles, and ducks his head to hide it. He stands and concentrates on the slabs of stone beneath them. He’s not much of a builder, and manipulating things that already exist, like this pile of rubble, is more difficult than morning something out of thin air, but the concrete starts to wind itself together. The building rises. It’s not terribly tall, maybe four or five stories, but Andrew is already leaning over the edge, his fingertips tracing the edge of the roof.

The temperature drops the higher they go, and Neil can see the hairs rise on Andrew’s arm. He peels his jacket—Andrew’s jacket—off, and offers it. “The dream, I can deal with. I’m here for you.”


	22. Chapter 22

Neil builds like he’s never built before, and he builds the forbidden.

He stands on the building he’s resurrected from Andrew’s rubble, and creates Andrew’s hotel room in New York on the top floor. It feels like a lifetime ago that he fell asleep on one end of the couch with Andrew up against the other end. He walks down from the roof into it, feeling Andrew follow him at his back, and adds the rumpled blanket Andrew had draped over him onto the couch.

Neil anchors the room into his mind as the centre of his map, and he builds his memories.

And Andrew watches.

Neil builds the warehouse they spent their time planning the inception job in, recreating with painstaking detail the roof they first became a they on. Neil doesn’t offer commentary even though he wants to, and Andrew doesn’t ask, just watches silently as Neil adds the little pile of cigarette stubs tucked under the ledge.

He builds the hotel they stayed at during the planning, the twin beds that Kevin and Andrew shared, with the bottle of vodka on the floor.

He makes as much of Andrew and Kevin’s house as he remembers, trying to recreate rooms he only saw once from a glimpse through the doorway. He parks their sports car in front. Round the corner, he recreates Sweetie’s. It looks hollow without all the people there, but he looks at the booth they sat in and adds an ice cream dessert, and his battered duffel bag under the table.

Summarised like this, Neil’s history with Andrew seems sparse. Limbo stretches for miles and miles around like empty canvas.

“Done?” asks Andrew, more unimpressed than asking an actual question.

There’s got to be more. He adds in the whiskey bar from Dan’s dream, even though it was another dream and not a real place, because it’s where he first showed himself to Andrew. Andrew looks around it with a mockery of interest, and pours himself a shot.

Neil closes his eyes for a moment, and thinks about the things he’s seen, the places he’s been. He doesn’t want to recreate his Evermore lab here, or his father’s house, but he remembers other, less bleak times.

There’s a bakery, which was opposite the shitty motel where his mother taught him French, and the smell of fresh bread wafts into the air. Next door is a library where Mary used to sneak books to Neil, too paranoid to enrol him in school but wanting him to carry on learning. Running outside it is a long stretch of freeway that Neil knows will go on forever, and he turns the ground on either side into patchy grass.

He skips the period when Mary died, goes right through to the tiny rented room Neil used to run his own operations out of, with nothing inside it apart from his banged up PASIV and a notebook full of forgery notes.

Andrew’s still walking behind him, not quite following, but touching the things that Neil comes up with. Neil draws back before Andrew can turn and see him looking. He frowns; there’s something missing. It’s not a place, it’s just – he looks overhead.

He’s never had to manipulate weather from within a dream before, but he thinks of long, bright days with a smattering of cloud, dry with a light breeze. Andrew scowls and squints as sunshine settles, warm over their skin, like he’s never seen sunshine before – and Neil supposes that if he’s forgotten everything, then he won’t have.

Neil swallows the lump that forms in his throat at that realisation, and it’s not until he tears his eyes off Andrew to go fiddle with the window—the stupid thing always jammed halfway—that Neil realises how tired he is. He staggers, wiped out under the effort of creating a landscape from within the world, and lurches. It’s only Andrew’s hand, fisted into the back of his t-shirt, that stops him from pitching straight out of the window.

As Neil gets his feet under him, Andrew releases him, but Neil can still feel the pull in his t-shirt where Andrew’s fingers dug in. He slumps down under the window and looks up at Andrew woozily. Breathing hurts, like someone ripped his ribcage apart and then stapled it a couple of inches tighter. His legs cramp up and Neil yelps, shifting his weight this way and that until it eases.

He sucks in air until he realises that his sweat is sticking him to the wall. He winces, and peels himself away to see Andrew still standing, looking down at him, his hand still half-curled into a claw by his side.

“Thanks.”

The hand clenches into a fist.

Neil ignores it. He’s not in a rush. He focuses on his own trembling hand instead. “Why am I so tired? It’s just a dream. It should be effortless.” And it was. Dreamscape is so responsive in limbo, it’s unbelievable. He could build cities here, and maintain it without having to concentrate. But it also takes more out of him. He mulls that over.

“Fascinating,” drawls Andrew, in a tone that indicates it’s anything but.

–

Neil builds. From Andrew’s building, he spirals out, adding buildings he remembers from his past, ones he’s driven past and yet others he knows from pictures and television. He builds for hours and hours at a time and then jogs back, soaked and shaking from exhaustion, and rests on the sofa in their New York hotel room.

Sometimes Andrew comes with him and watches as he works, or touches the buildings. Sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes Neil catches him holding the lighter, lighting it again and again.

Neil wonders if he remembers anything.

Every so often, Neil will expect there to be other people, for his mind to auto-populate the dream, especially as he adds more and more buildings, but there never is. It’s a space just for himself and Andrew.

They don’t sleep. They don’t need to.

They don’t need to eat either, but Neil imagines up ice cream, pints of it, into the hotel mini-bar and Andrew takes it out.

Neil’s hair and beard grows, and he removes it with the edge of a thought, and it grows again. Andrew never changes, frozen in time.

Neil loses track of the days, not that they mean anything when the sun rises and sets at his whim, but he knows that sometimes he doesn’t speak for days, and sometimes the silence is so terrifying, so oppressing that he talks until he’s hoarse, reciting lists he’s carefully memorised, lest he forget anything. If Andrew can’t remember anything, Neil’s going to have to do it for him.

_Level one, Dan. New York. Level two, Kevin. Hotel. Level three, training course. Me. Neil. Nathaniel. Neil._

Andrew hears him, Neil knows, because he’s not making their past, their reality, a secret. If Andrew’s curious, he doesn’t show it.

At some point, Neil runs out of things to build. He’s sure he’s seen other things, other buildings, other places in his mind, but he reaches the end of the spiral and blinks, his mind suddenly blank of ideas. He knows there’s more – New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, they’re all places he’s been and he can’t think of anything at all.

“Done?” asks Andrew from behind him, again, and Neil turns to stare at him, panic surging like a wave of nausea, swelling from his stomach. This time though, Andrew adds, “Are you going to show me something real now?”

Neil scrubs at his face, at the pinpricks of emotion threatening to swell at the corners of his eyes and at the back of his throat, and laughs instead. “Something real. Of course.”

He turns to look at himself in the reflection of the nearest window. He’s been presenting himself the way he appears in reality, hoping that the familiarity will help Andrew’s memory. Brown hair, brown eyes.

With a blink, he looks like his father’s son again. The sight still sends a little shiver down his spine, but it’s different enough from his forge of Nathan that the image holds. He fingers the hem of his t-shirt for a moment, before tugging it off.

Neil is greeted with Andrew blatantly eyeing him up and down when he turns around, lingering on the raised ridges and faded white lines that map Neil’s life. “I ask for something real and you start taking your clothes off.”

“It’s the part of me that doesn’t change.”

Andrew’s eyes meet Neil’s, and he sees when Andrew registers the change in colour, but all he says before walking off is, “Hmm.”

Neil has literally no idea if that’s a positive sign.

That evening, Andrew sits up on the couch, his back against the arm as he faces Neil, which is new. Neil isn’t really sure what to do with his attention, now he’s caught it. He cut the day short, not sure whether to continue with the fake world he’s created around them or not. He considers pulling all of it down, but he can’t stand the thought of surrounding Andrew with all that blank space again.

He’s left it for now. It’ll do until he can think of something else. It would help if Andrew gave him any sort of indication as to what he was feeling. He draws his own legs up against his chest, and stares back at Andrew.

“A penny for your thoughts.” Andrew seems unfazed at the scrutiny.

“Is this what you want?” Neil asks eventually. He wanted to be patient, to let Andrew deal with this however he wanted, but, well. Neil Josten is not really a patient man.

Andrew doesn't answer.

"What _do_ you want then?"

“Nothing.”

Neil tries not to frown, but something must appear on his face.

“What? Would it make you feel better if I said I wanted a rainforest and a castle in the sky?” Andrew’s lip curls and he makes a tossing motion. Something flies through the air and Neil catches it automatically. A one cent piece. A penny, for his thoughts. It’s fading already, but it’s more than he’s seen Andrew dream in... weeks, by now. Neil stares at him.

Andrew’s lip curls. “So generous, thinking about what I want all the time. What do _you_ want?”

“I want... “ Neil breaks off, frustrated. They’re both here, in this world that Neil’s trying to build for them, that neither of them want to be in. How apt the name of Limbo is.

“I want you to want something. Anything. _Something_.”

The air stills around them. Neil only notices because it’s the same deafening silence that smothered them when he first got here, and it hasn’t been like that here for a long time now. Neil’s filled the place with wind and movement or it would drive him crazy, which means that Andrew’s the one who’s taken it away.

Andrew hasn’t moved – no, that’s inaccurate. He’s unnaturally still. The kind of stillness that comes across a person when they feel someone so large and all at once that they have to take a moment to swallow it whole before it gets away from them.

And then there’s something that takes Neil a moment to pinpoint, because it’s not quite movement, but there’s _something_ changing.

It’s Andrew’s armbands. Neil didn’t notice because they’re black, but they’re... wet. And then the edges around Andrew’s wrist are seeping red, droplets of blood that gather around the base of his wrist.

“You’re bleeding,” says Neil, horrified, watching as rivulets of blood trickle over his hands, between his fingers.

Andrew looks down at himself, finally, and flexes his hands almost in surprise. He peels the sodden armbands off, and they both watch as the dozens of cuts across his arm swell with a line of red. Andrew blinks, as if in a daze. “Old wounds.”

The words strike Neil as though Andrew himself punched him in the chest. “You remember.”

“No.” Andrew shakes his head, and gets up, walks away, a quick stride that implies that Neil’s not invited. “I _know_.”

–

Neil builds Andrew a rainforest and a castle in the sky. Just in case.

And then he waits for him. What else can he do?

When Andrew returns, his armbands are back in place. They look dry, and there’s no trace of blood anywhere. He opens the door and Neil rushes to his feet, opens his mouth to say something when Andrew holds up a finger warningly. “Am I being incepted?”

That whisks whatever words Neil was planing to say straight out of his mouth. “No!”

“You lie,” says Andrew, standing in the doorway. “You told me so yourself.”

“I don’t lie to you.” Neil sits back down on the couch. “Actually, I can’t lie to you. You went through my mind and found out everything you wanted to.”

“Needed to,” says Andrew.

“So you remember?”

“No,” says Andrew. “I told you. I know.”

“What does that even mean? You _know_? What do you know if you can’t remember?”

“Don’t,” says Andrew. “I _don’t_ remember.”

“But not that you couldn’t remember,” says Neil slowly.

“I’m sure I could, if I wanted to.”

“And you don’t want to.” Each step is like revealing a bit more of Andrew to Neil, and it’s frustrating how slow it is, but he clings to each shred he’s allowed of Andrew.

Andrew finally walks in, closes the door behind him. “I want to not remember.”

He walks over to the couch. It’s Neil’s couch now; they haven’t shared it since this was reality. Andrew considers it for a moment, and then sits in the middle, squashing Neil up against one end of it. Their knees knock together and it’s pretty pathetic how Neil fixates on that.

“I know me,” says Andrew, and tilts his head. Suddenly, Neil’s not so concentrated on their knees. “And I know you.”


	23. Chapter 23

Andrew moves his leg so that they’re pressed together from ankle to hip and Neil turns his body in towards him like a sunflower towards the sun, pressing his head on the back of the couch, inches from Andrew’s shoulder. Andrew turns his head slowly, until his nose brushes Neil’s, and Neil holds his breath all the way until Andrew kisses him.

It’s not until Andrew draws back that Neil realises he’s closed his eyes, and his opens them to find Andrew staring intently at him. “Yes,” he says with an exhale of breath, pre-empting the question.

Andrew quirks an eyebrow in lieu of a question, and Neil says, “We ask. If it’s okay.”

“Yes or no,” says Andrew, likely remembering when Neil first got here and asked if he could join Andrew on top of his building. Neil nods, and Andrew holds his hand over Neil’s leg, and tries it out. “Yes or no?”

“Yes,” says Neil. Andrew splays his fingers across Neil’s thigh, warm even through the jeans, a solid weight that’s more intimate than he was expecting. They stay like that until Andrew speaks up again.

“Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Whatever.”

Neil settles into the couch, and starts with this: “I was born Nathaniel Wesninski.”

He talks for hours into the night. Andrew never looks like he’s bored of listening, even though he only rarely says anything back. Neil tells him about his father training him to be like him, and never quite living up to expectations. He tells him about being sold to the Moriyamas and discovering the world of dreamsharing, discovering forging and that he could be anyone he wanted, even if it was only for a short time.

He talks about other things too. He tells Andrew about how Kevin in reality is so different to his reputation, and how he could charm the rich clients and corporations that clamoured to hire them on. He talks about meeting Riko in a dream for the first time, and Kevin’s unwilling anguish to do anything about him.

It’s one long conversation that flows and ebbs; they pick it up from wherever they last leave it. Sometimes, Andrew nudges him towards specific topics – what their plan for inception was, when Neil met Kevin and Nicky and Aaron, how Neil picks up new forges.

Sometimes, Andrew doesn’t want to hear about anything at all. He’ll disappear for hours into the dreamscape and Neil will later find him dangling his legs over the edge of the roof of the warehouse when it turns dark. He suspects that Andrew is practising his dreaming, but he doesn’t know for sure, and Andrew will tell him if he wants him to know anyway.

He doesn’t know how much Andrew remembers.

“Come on,” says Andrew one day, and leads Neil to the house in Columbia.

Neil’s vague idea of what the bedroom looked like has been fleshed out by Andrew. He’d always assumed that Kevin and Andrew shared a bedroom, before, since he’d assumed that they were partners in more ways than one, but it’s now obvious that this is Andrew’s bedroom.

There’s a king-sized bed, but all the pillows are in one enormous pile. There aren’t a lot of decorations, but everything seems to match, like it’s part of a set of furniture, and there are a few personal belongings scattered around – a clock and a lamp on the bedside table, clothes draped over the back of a chair, some books on the shelf.

Andrew lets Neil look his fill, and it all looks innocuous until Neil sees the open PASIV lying on the floor. The casing is broken, one of the hinges fallen apart, and there’s a fist-sized dent in the side of it. The window’s also been shattered, and blood laces the jagged edges still lingering in the frame.

“What’s this?”

Andrew drums his fingers against his thigh, betraying a flash of emotion before answering. “Floor -5.”

It takes a moment to figure out what he’s referring to, but then he says, startled, “In Kevin’s mindpalace?”

He looks around again when Andrew nods confirmation. When they had gone under into Kevin’s private dream, it had looked like Andrew hadn’t known what -5 was. And why would Andrew’s bedroom be one of Kevin’s hidden memories that he goes to revisit over and over?

“I’ve been here before,” says Andrew, “Limbo.”

Neil sinks slowly onto the side of the bed, but Andrew stays where he is, leaning against the doorframe. Andrew doesn’t wait for Neil to ask before he expands: “We were dreaming. Kevin wanted to try inception. It had never been done before.”

“He told you he wanted to try it on you?”

“I said yes. We went down as many layers as we could manage to keep stable.”

“How many?”

Andrew raises one shoulder in a shrug. “Kevin’s forte isn’t stability.”

Neil will give him that. “So you ended up in limbo.”

“Developed that little trick with compounding distance with time,” says Andrew. It’s the first time he’s mentioned it directly, and Neil has to admit that he has wondered if any of the others have ended up in limbo, but unable to find them because they just haven’t walked for long enough. There’s something else that Andrew wants to say though, and Neil waits him out even as Andrew’s fingers, tapping incessantly on the wooden doorway, accelerate.

“Kevin’s never been in limbo.”

“He didn’t come down with you?”

“He sent me down deliberately,” says Andrew. “When I was in limbo, that’s when he performed inception on me.”

The staccato of his fingers ceases abruptly, as if he’s suddenly realised how much they give away of his current mood.

“You said he tried it and failed,” says Neil. “You said it didn’t take.”

“He said he wanted me to care about dreamsharing.” Andrew crosses the room and sits next to Neil, dropping backwards until he’s starfished across the bed.

Neil thinks the situation through. Inception relies on something thinking that they’ve come up with an idea, a thought, a feeling, themselves. The human brain naturally rebels against being told what to think. It makes no sense to tell someone beforehand what you’re going to try and incept. “You didn’t think he could do it.”

“Of course I didn’t,” says Andrew. “Such a stupid idea to incept.”

“But—he managed it?”

“No.” Andrew rolls his eyes so that he can see Neil as he leans over the bed, before going back to staring up at the ceiling as if it’s easier to talk when there’s no real audience. “I told you, it was a stupid idea. I think he did something else instead.”

A pause. “I don’t know what.”

“He tricked you,” says Neil, stunned. “He lied to you.”

Andrew drapes an arm over his eyes, and snorts. “Don’t say that like you haven’t done it before.”

“But—fuck,” says Neil, at a loss for words. Kevin threw Andrew off the scent and incepted him right under his nose. He forgets, sometimes, just how good Kevin is. He looks over at the broken window. “No wonder you wouldn’t work with him after that.”

That makes Andrew sit up. “Couldn’t.”

“What?”

“I _couldn’t_ work with him. I told him I would watch his back,” says Andrew, and Neil bites the inside of his cheek. If Kevin had tried anything like that with him, he would have definitely ditched him. Andrew is much more faithful to his friends than he is.

“Why couldn’t you work with him?”

“Couldn’t keep a dream up. Whatever he put in my head made me crazy.” Andrew pauses for dramatic effect. “Well, more crazy.”

Neil smiles, despite himself.

“Come on,” says Andrew, and Neil gets up and follows him again. They walk through Neil’s built world, everything where Neil last left it. Andrew’s buildings have long since crumbled into dust, whisked away by the breeze.

They take it slow, meandering out until they reach the edge of where Neil stopped building. There’s a rope ladder that reaches into the sky and Neil looks up to see the castle in the sky he’d made on a whim.

Andrew heads up and Neil follows him. It’s not as flimsy as a rope ladder would actually be, but it’s still strange to look down and see virtually nothing between himself and the ground.

The castle floats on a bed of clouds above everything else; Neil hadn’t really thought through the logistics of it, but it seems as stable as anything else. It moves around—as anything in the sky might—so it’s not always in the same place but Andrew appears to have come up here before. When they appear in front of the castle gates, Andrew leads them across the courtyard and up the stairs of one of the battlements.

The view here overlooks the whole of the dream; Neil can see the slightly wonky spiral he built buildings in, until it’s overtaken by the spill of the rainforest.

“Tell me about them,” says Andrew, and Neil doesn’t understand until Andrew nods towards the buildings. Neil leans over, and points them out one by one, recalling where he’d seen it, the little details about it that stuck in his mind.

When he pauses for breath, Andrew says, “I’m going to pull it down.”

“Pull what down?”

“All of it.” Andrew raises a hand, and there’s a lit cigarette between two fingers. He raises his other hand, and with it comes a thundering crash that reverberates the stone beneath their feet, the sound of a hundred buildings falling into the ground at once.

Neil grabs at the parapet and gapes down. This time, there isn’t any rubble, everything’s just gone, like the earth swallowed them up to create a blank canvas. The only thing that stays is the castle in the sky.

Neil feels... a little bit hollow. He stares uncomprehendingly down at the ground. He’d spent a lot of time and effort into building it all, hoping that it would help Andrew, and it’s just all—gone.

“Oh Neil,” says Andrew, and Neil tears his eyes away to find Andrew looking at him. “Stuck in your miserable past. That’s how people get lost in dreams, don’t you know?”

“I—” Neil blinks, taken aback. “I’m not reliving memories.”

Andrew ignores that, and heads for the rope ladder and Neil can only huff and jog to catch up. Andrew’s waiting for him at the bottom, watching him climb down and chewing his thumbnail, so he can’t be too annoyed at Neil.

He waits until Neil has two feet firmly on the ground. “We need,” he declares, “an ice cream parlour.”

“I don’t know any,” says Neil, baffled. They’re not exactly the kind of thing he spends his time in.

“Make one up,” says Andrew carelessly. Neil gives it a shot. Andrew watches him build the thing, and offers no comment until he’s done. It’s a bit lopsided, because he’s not so good at freeform, and there are bright colours because he thinks they have bright colours? There’s lots of ice cream, in any case, and some tables and chairs.

“Doesn’t look like any ice cream parlour I know,” says Andrew, and takes up a seat. “Good. Is there chocolate mint?”

It takes Neil a few buildings to catch up—no wonder Andrew thinks he’s slow—but after a few days, he realises that they’re making things up from scratch. There’s no right or wrong, and there isn’t the urgency Neil had before to fill the space with something, anything. They’re rebuilding this world from scratch.

Sometimes, Neil will look at the space where something else used to exist, and he can’t remember what it looked like. He can’t even remember what his mother sounded like anymore. He thinks he should care more than he does.

Neil does most of the building, but every so often, Andrew will make something. It’s Andrew who makes the block of apartments they spend the most of their time in. Their preferred unit is only seven storeys up, but it’s bigger on the inside than the outside. There’s a balcony for when they want to be outside, but not go outside, and the entirety of one wall is one large window.

The bed is bigger than it needs to be, and the couch smaller, so that when they sit side by side, they crowd into each other’s personal space. Andrew smokes inside the apartment, though the smell never lingers, and one day, his lighter doesn’t light.

Andrew clicks it again. No spark. He tilts his head. “Interesting.”

Neil reaches for it. “I can make it light. It’s a dream, I can—”

Andrew tucks it into his pocket, and lights his cigarette with a click of his fingers instead. “I don’t care if this is a dream or not.”

He leans into Neil’s side, and Neil lifts his head to make room for him to slot against Neil’s side. Neil remembers something, something he’s said before. “Just because it’s a dream doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

Andrew doesn’t say anything, but it’s acquiescence, coming from him. Something feels different about Andrew’s face against his shoulder. It’s harsher than before. No, that’s not it, it’s something specific. Stubble. Andrew’s got stubble. Neil tries to not let the excitement show on his face, but of course Andrew notices. He blinks, clearly impatient for Neil to spit it out already.

“You’re aging.”

“That’s what happens when time passes.”

Neil reaches out and runs his fingertips across the stubble, letting the coarseness scrape at his skin, and Andrew lets him do it for a moment of indulgence before batting his hands away in favour of kisses.

Not that Neil can ever tell how time down here passes, but it feels like an age that he spends with Andrew’s hands slid up his t-shirt and their thighs pressed over each other’s and Neil makes a slightly embarrassing breathless noise when Andrew finally pulls away.

“Hello,” says Andrew, looking at a spot behind Neil. He sounds innocuous, but Neil recognises the kind of stillness that comes from preparation, not fear, and Neil immediately twists to look behind him.

“ _What the hell are you doing_?” Kevin Day is standing in the doorway, and he looks absolutely furious.

Neil gawps at him, stunned. It’s been so long since he’s heard the sound of anyone apart from Andrew and himself, so long since he’s seen another human being. He can’t even remember if that’s what Kevin actually sounds like. He looks back at Andrew.

“What?” asks Andrew, as if this isn’t groundbreaking.

“He’s not _mine_ ,” says Neil.

He knows, because Neil’s projection of Kevin is a little taller, more refined and polished than he is in real life, based on Neil’s mental image of him before he got to know Kevin and all his annoyances and flaws. This Kevin looks exactly the same as when Neil left him one level, one lifetime, ago. It must be Andrew’s projection of him.

“Huh,” says Andrew as Kevin starts stalking towards them. “Who would have thought?”

“What are you doing?!” asks Kevin, again.

“Kissing, mostly,” says Andrew, whose palms are still curled over Neil’s ribs, his t-shirt rucked up over them.

Kevin splutters, going a blotchy kind of red as if he hadn’t noticed the state that they’re in. “I mean _in here_. Haven’t you been here for long enough? Are you planning on coming back to reality yet?”

Andrew looks at Neil, who shrugs one shoulder, before turning back to Kevin. “Not particularly.”

“The job is almost done,” says Kevin, and though he carries on talking at them, Neil tunes him out in favour of Andrew. 

“Are you sure that’s a projection?”

“Yeah. Kevin would never risk losing himself in limbo,” says Neil. Kevin is not like the two of them.

Andrew nods, and takes his word for it. He raises his hand and there’s suddenly a gun in it. He pulls the trigger, and Kevin slumps back against the wall, looking slightly shocked and terribly affronted. “You shot me!”

“You wouldn’t shut up.”

Andrew’s project of Kevin dies a moment later. Neil looks at the body bleeding over their floor. “Do you think we should go back?”

“Oh, Neil. Just because bits of my mind are turning up to tell us what to do doesn’t mean we have to do it,” says Andrew, and leans in again, the gun vanished into nowhere. “Yes or no?”

“Yes,” says Neil and goes to meet him halfway, before —

“Wait. We should probably move into the bedroom.” He nods at the corpse of Kevin Day slumped against the wall. “His eyes are still open, and everything.”

 

**50 years later**

**(alternatively, 2 and a half years later**

**or is it a month and a half later**

**or only two days later**

**or possibly, just under three hours later)**

 

“Finished,” says Neil, stepping back with satisfaction. He looks up, where an aged castle floats in the sky directly above. It’s tethered to one spot now, attached to the grand spiral staircase they’ve just finished building that opens up into the middle of the courtyard.

After so many years, it’s been getting more and more tiring climbing that flimsy rope ladder. Neil’s knees are blaming him for so many years of misuse.

The staircase reaches into the sky, and is over the spot where once a New York hotel room stood.

“Still should have made an elevator,” mutters Andrew, from where he’s pressed against Neil’s back.

This completes their city. The spiral they’d built backwards from is all filled in, and there are other people here now, Andrew’s projections slowly filling in the gaps. Neil hasn’t seen Renee again, or Kevin, but he suspects that they played their part here already.

They’ve had all of this lifetime together, working on this. It’s time to move onto the next. They climb up the staircase, the polished wood smooth under their hands.

Andrew holds his hand out and Neil slides his own into it, a gesture so familiar that it feels like coming home.

“It seems a shame to leave just when it’s all finished.”

“It’ll be here,” says Andrew, as if it’s a convenient vacation location, and stands at Neil’s side, facing the courtyard of the castle, their feet only just on the threshold. Neil leans backwards, feeling his centre of gravity shift until he’s looking up at the sky.

For a single moment, he and Andrew are horizontal, floating, flying.

They fall.

And they wake up.


	24. Chapter 24

Neil wakes, and something immediately feels wrong. He's in a body he hasn't inhabited in decades. He opens his eyes; the room is dark. There's hazy light coming from the side and he leans towards it. A window, with dawn starting to leak through the clouds. He rotates his ankles, stretches his knees out. He grunts and clicks out the crick in his neck. There's another one in his back but that'll have to wait. He sits up.

There's a rustle, and Neil swivels his head around to see people looming in the dim light towards him. He staggers to his feet immediately, an instinct never lost, and feels something tug at his arm – a needle, with a tube for the PASIV.

He knows these people, his mind supplies. That's right – there's Nicky, and Aaron. Dan and Matt. And next to them all, next to him, still waking up himself: Andrew.

His head is muddled, memories entwining with dreams. It all felt so real down there, the passage of time as slow as in reality, but parts of it are already starting to slip away, fall into that ethereal part of his memory where they'll become pleasant but vague impressions of once upon a time. It's all right though – Andrew will remember all of it.

Neil slides the needle out and drops it to the floor, and finally does click out his back. He's sure he started in a sensible position, but his entire body is complaining at him for spending so many hours asleep in a strange position.

"You're back," says Matt, his voice low but obviously relieved. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," says Neil. He turns. On the bed is Riko Moriyama, still asleep under the last vestiges of sedative. "Did it work?"

"No way to know yet. Where's Kevin?"

Andrew stands up beside Neil. He looks younger now, than... then. Perhaps Neil hadn't noticed the change so much since he was there all the way through it, but it feels like Andrew looks younger. "What do you mean, where's Kevin?"

They look around to where Kevin is still asleep, legs and arms unnaturally straight like he doesn't ever move even when unconscious.

"He went down into limbo after you two," says Nicky. "To look for you."

There's a moment's pause.

"Ah," says Neil.

"Ah? What's _ah_?"

"I think we may have shot him," says Neil.

There's another moment's pause.

"We're getting out of here," says Andrew eventually, leaning down to roll up the tubes and wrapping them up into the PASIV case. Aaron follows suit, snapping the laptop shut and gathering up the gun. Nicky hovers, uncertain, until Andrew shoves the PASIV at him and throws Kevin over his shoulder. Neil thinks Dan raises an eyebrow, but it's too dark to tell properly and anyway, it's not like it's anything they can fix here. The dream's gone, all the dreamers are out.

"What about Jean?" asks Nicky.

Andrew doesn't even answer, just waits for Neil to get the door before they pad out of the room, carefully peeking down corridors and making no one sees them come out.

"He needs to stay," explains Neil briefly. "If he disappears, that'll just be suspicious. He knows how to take care of himself."

They get back up to their own rooms just as the morning is a yellow stain starting to spread up from the horizon. Andrew's huffing, but Neil knows how strong Andrew is first hand – carrying Kevin back up one floor shouldn't exert him that much. Then he sees the thin, white set of his lips, and remembers the injections, the stuff that Andrew uses after dreaming. They'd spent so much time under, and he hadn't even thought to ask about it.

Neil looks around the hotel room as he leads the way in. It feels different, now. There are things, details, he missed out when he built it for Andrew that he can see now. Andrew rolls Kevin onto one of the beds in the bedroom, and checks his vitals.

"Medically, he's fine," says Aaron. "Just appears to be in a deep sleep."

But Kevin should have woken with the rest of them. Riko's the only one they deliberately kept sleeping for a bit longer, so that they'd have time to get out of there.

Andrew doesn't say anything, but he sits himself down in a calculated manner on the other bed, keeping himself together in front of other people.

"Out," says Neil, striding towards the door and shepherding the rest of them out with it. "Celebrate, we did it. Post-job protocol, guys. Split, I’ll get you your money."

It’s standard procedure for a job, especially one with a large payout and a big team. They all disappear off to different states, different airports and car rentals and stay low-profile in case anyone comes after them. Money gets wired from the client to an off-shore account before being split from there and the team rendezvous a few months down the line in a pre-agreed location if there are any problems to sort out.

"Kevin's in a sleep coma," says Nicky, wide-eyed. "We can't exactly—"

"You don't even like him," says Neil, and tries to close the door around Nicky's body. "Nicky, it's fine. We'll fix it."

"What about Andrew? He's got—"

"Grab me one of his injections. We'll fix it," he reiterates.

Nicky squints at him for a moment before sloping off. He does go grab one of the injections for Neil and Neil takes a moment to wave goodbye to Matt and Dan, who are already packing their things up and heading out. They grin wearily, and mouth ‘good luck’ at him.

"You're like a whole new person," remarks Nicky as he slides a slim black case over to Neil.

“I’m older in here,” says Neil, tapping his temple.

Nicky opens his mouth to say something, and then shakes his head. “See you around. And—take care of Andrew.”

He leaves, Aaron tossing him a bag as they set out, and Neil shuts the door behind them. As soon as there’s the click of the lock sliding home, Andrew rolls over to dry heave into the waste paper basket. Neil tosses the black syringe case onto the bed next to Andrew.

In another time, Andrew would have glared at Neil and thrown it back at him, but now he scowls, but clutches at it anyway.

"So," says Neil, suppressing the sudden bubble of hysteria that rises in his chest. "Not a projection then."

He stares down at the prone form of Kevin Day as Andrew wheezes a pained exhale of laughter with no such restraint. It looks like he's just sleeping, and Aaron had said that his vitals were fine so Neil tries nudging him, shoving him, slapping him around the face. Nothing. His reflexes work, his feet kick away when Neil taps his knee, but it's like so deep a sleep that nothing gets through to him.

Andrew's breath is growing ragged by the time Neil sits down on the edge of his bed. He feels Andrew's fingers creep around his hip and lets them cling even as they press little claw-bruises into his skin.

"What even happens to someone's mind once they die when they're in limbo?" asks Neil. There are all sorts of theories, true, but in reality, there are so few people who have gone into limbo anyway. Dreamers are grandiose, they like the thrill of what they do and the thought of achieving the impossible, but they're also people who don't dare to do the things they do in dreams in real life. That's why Neil had never even considered the idea that it had actually been Kevin they had seen in limbo, so long ago. Kevin doesn't make risks like that.

Andrew doesn't answer, but Neil feels him pressing his face into the small of Neil's back, and the tremor in his strong arms. He reaches down, and hesitantly smooths away the blond hair falling into his eyes. They've had _together_ for so long now, but Neil wonders if they spent all of that time running away from reality.

"We'll go back down," says Andrew, his voice harsh, and Neil knows his uncertainty has just been answered. No, Andrew makes no distinction between dream and reality. It's all real, to him, just as it is for Neil too.

"Let me go first," says Neil, and Andrew's eyes narrow with disapproval. "If I go down and don't come back up, come down for me. I'd feel better knowing you've got my back."

"Spend eight hours together in a dream and you're practically cloying," says Andrew, grinding the words out between his teeth, which is close to an acquiescence coming from him.

Neil waits.

"Fine," says Andrew, eventually. "I'm coming down after your damn ass if you don't find him."

Neil slides off the bed and kneels on the carpet as Andrew's eyes take a moment to focus on his, and leans forward for a kiss. He makes a promise. "I'll come back."

It takes a moment to set up, for Neil to flush out the old somnacin and replace it with a vial of normal, non-sedated stuff, and Andrew watches him through pained eyes. Neil wishes he'd take the damn injection to ease his pain, but at the same time, he knows Andrew doesn't dare let himself become unable to watch Neil's back. Neil slides a new needle into Kevin's arm, which is starting to look a little like a pincushion by this point, and then into his own. He lies down next to Andrew, lets Andrew curl up against his side like a familiar weight, and presses the PASIV button.

He falls asleep, again.

Neil isn't sure what to expect when he goes under. He was half expecting to reappear in limbo, where they'd left Kevin—and what did they do with his body anyway? Neil doesn't quite remember—but this isn't it. This is familiar ground, with a pretentious touchscreen at the end of a pretentious hallway.

"Kevin's fucking mind palace," says Neil, out loud, and sighs.

He gets to the end, and looks at his options. All the way down to level -5, which means that there's nothing new here at least. Neil presses all of them, and waits for the elevator to arrive. It feels slightly different to last time. Neil can't quite put his finger on it until the door pings open, and there's the stupid mirrored cylinder that casts a thousand reflections back at him, and inside it is Riko Moriyama.

"Hello Nathaniel," he says, and Neil is so astonished that Riko’s on top of him, tackling him to the ground before he reacts, flinging all his weight onto one side and rolling them over. He staggers to his feet as Riko does the same, and Riko has a gun in his hand but so does Neil and Neil isn’t too bothered about accuracy so he shoots at the same time as raising his hand and gets Riko in the shin, the hip, his chest, and the last one halfway across his face.

Riko falls backwards into the elevator, his shots in the wall behind Neil, the tiles next to his foot. The door, halfway closed, pings as it registers something blocking the door sensors, and start to slide back open.

“Fuck.” Neil grabs him by the ankles and hauls him unceremoniously out of the elevator. There’s a bullet embedded in the back of the elevator, with spiderweb cracks and bits of blood and brains ruining the perfect reflections, but Neil doesn’t care. He watches Riko's body as the doors close, just in case he gets back up again.

The first floor down doesn’t appear inhabited, but it also looks derelict in a way it didn’t last time Neil was here. The lights are off, and dust motes hang in the air. The next floor down is like that too. The gym equipment looks old and battered, and there's a fuzzy layer of grey coating the floor.

Floor -3 is the one they based the running track off of, and it looks like it did when Andrew and Neil and Riko were through with it; trees are uprooted, the grass has all been pulled up and swathes of it are now just churned mud. Neil is still staring when the elevator doors start to close again, which is how he notices the footprints in the mud coming from within the level right up to the elevator door. That must be the escaped projection of Riko then.

Neil wonders what happens when projections from one memory escape into another.

The fourth floor down looks the same as when Andrew brought him here, so Neil steps out. It has changed though, but Neil doesn’t notice until he’s down the corridor and the nameplates next to the rooms are all gone. He remembers, vaguely, how far down Riko and Kevin’s room was, but when he tries a door, the room is stripped down, the mattresses and walls bare. He tries the next one down, just in case he got the wrong one, and the next one, and they’re all empty.

He heads back to the elevator, but the end of the corridor is blank.

“You can’t leave,” snarls a voice behind him, and Neil turns to find Riko, again. “If I can’t leave, you can’t leave.”

Seriously, Neil can’t be bothered to deal with this. He raises his hand and shoots Riko in between the eyes.

“I am so done with you,” he growls, and turns around. He imagines the ridiculous touchscreen and the door in the wall, and it reappears. Neil isn’t sure how many projections of Riko Kevin’s got running around, especially exacerbated by the job they’ve just been running, but he seriously hopes that’s the last one.

Level -5 is exactly what Andrew thought it would be. It’s Andrew’s bedroom in Columbia, and there’s the PASIV with the dent and Kevin’s projection of Andrew, sitting under the windowsill, smoking.

He looks over when Neil enters. “Oh, this is new.”

It looks like Andrew—Kevin is the best, after all—but it doesn’t feel like him. His words are a little too sharp, his manner a little too dismissive. It might have been Andrew once upon a time, but it's not him anymore. It’s not Neil’s Andrew.

Neil looks around. “Where’s Kevin?”

Andrew gestures towards the otherwise empty room, as if to say, _Voila! Clearly not here, you imbecile._ Neil frowns, not understanding. If Kevin isn’t on any of the levels, he doesn’t know where he could be.

He turns, thinking that maybe he should go back to the earlier floors and explore them properly. They had looked empty, but they’re much bigger than this single room memory, and he could have been further in. But when Neil opens the door to the elevator, there is no elevator. It opens into the hallway in the house in Columbia and beyond that, the living room and kitchen.

“You can’t leave,” says Andrew, and Neil shudders at the idea of Andrew saying the same words as Riko, just moments ago. Andrew says them differently though. Riko had meant them as a threat, a weapon; Andrew says it matter-of-factly.

“Why not?” asks Neil, trying to imagine the elevator back as he did earlier.

Andrew’s looking out of the window. “I’d leave then. And I can’t leave. Not until I forgive him.” The sneer in his voice is obvious even though Neil can’t see his face.

Neil joins him at the window. There’s nothing outside, just a vague smear of sky blue and concrete grey that stretches on forever, because the outside was unimportant in Kevin's memory. It’s the room that’s important. “What’s to forgive?”

“You know.” His voice is flat.

“Not properly,” says Neil. Andrew ignores him. Neil is coming to the startling realisation that Kevin is actually terribly unobservant. His projection of Andrew hasn’t stared at Neil with hooded eyes even once, and he laughs out loud when he realises. Kevin’s projection of Andrew _hates Neil_.

And close on the heels of that thought comes another. This is Kevin’s mind. He’s here, in this dream. He’s _everywhere_ in this dream _._ This is his projection of Andrew, which means that it’s a part of his mind. It knows everything that Kevin knows.

Neil asks, “What thought did he plant in your head when he did inception?”

“Subtle,” says Andrew. And then, because Kevin doesn’t want Neil to know, and because Kevin’s projection of Andrew lives to annoy the fuck out of Kevin, Andrew says, “He wanted me to—”

“Want to live,” says Kevin’s voice from behind Neil. Projection-Andrew’s face clouds over and he turns back to the window, his hands clenched into fists.

He doesn’t look entirely real; the edges of him are fuzzy, like an unformed dream. He didn’t come out of the elevator because the door’s still open from when Neil tried to get out, and it looks like he’s slightly confused as to why he’s here. It’s like he just appeared, fuelled by willpower and guilt.

“I wanted him to… want,” says Kevin again, quietly. “Anything. Something.”

It explains Andrew’s change in behaviour afterwards. A man like Andrew doesn’t know how to want anything, how to cope with that when their brain is wired to not want anything. And now Kevin keeps a version of Andrew in his head that is stuck in that moment in time.

“So,” says Neil deliberately, slowly. “Like I said. What’s to forgive?”

It’s not the truth – far from it, because Neil doesn’t think that Andrew will ever truly forgive Kevin for betraying his trust, but he doesn’t hate Kevin. He’s nothing like this fake person filling the window in front of him that Kevin created to batter his own conscience with.

“He doesn't hate me?”

“No.”

“How do you know.”

“I spent fifty years in limbo with him.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

Kevin looks down at his hands and they’re solidifying, becoming more real even as the room starts to disintegrate around them like a sigh of relief. “I want to live.”

The floors blur and sink into each other, each crumbling away. Neil has a feeling that’s the last he’s going to see of Kevin’s mind palace.

When they wake, Neil turns his head to the left to see Kevin’s eyes blinking open slowly. He takes in their surroundings, and rolls over to make eye contact with Neil. On Neil’s other side, Andrew is pressed against him, the tremors in his body all too obvious now. He scans his eyes over them, both of them, first vaguely and then more consideringly.

Kevin opens his mouth. His forehead furrows, like he's remembering something that's trying to slip away. He says, accusingly, “You _shot_ me.”

“You’re awake. Thank fuck,” says Andrew, and stabs himself in the thigh with a syringe.

Neil begins to laugh.


	25. Chapter 25

**Six months later**

 

_IMAGE: a snippet of a newspaper obituary; there is a headshot of a Riko Moriyama in a suit_

_TRANSCRIPT:_

_IN MEMORIAM._

_In loving memory of RIKO MORIYAMA, aged 26, who sadly passed on 3rd April. He will be missed by his family and friends. He is survived by his father, Tetsuji Moriyama. For full funeral details, please contact New… [the rest of the article is torn off]_

 

“You don’t need them anymore,” says Kevin, as he watches Neil open the safe.

Neil shuffles the folders together – they make up the sum total of their research on Evermore, the Somnacin trials, the patient records, everything. “Just in case.”

They had made a second deal with Ichirou. He would lean on his government contacts and Tetsuji for the illegal human trials to be shut down, and the team would not expose the operation to the public or the press.

“There’s still so much we could find out,” Kevin had argued, though it was a feeble attempt after both Andrew and Neil had glared at him. “I’m sure we can research it in other ways,” he had amended hastily.

And so the deal had been struck. But as Neil said, it was useful to have that evidence around, just in case.

The safe is slim, built inconspicuously into the space between two cupboards of a new apartment Neil and Andrew buy with some of the money they got from the inception job. It’s not the same as the one in limbo, but that’s okay. It’s in Chicago, and it’s on the second floor, and there’s a tiny balcony and it’s conveniently located above a row of takeout restaurants. They’re planning to buy a couple of others around the States, but this is their base at the moment.

The files take up about two thirds of the space in the safe, and Andrew slides a briefcase full of syringes into the remaining space.

Kevin presses his lips together. “Is that safe?”

“It’s a safe,” says Andrew. “It’s supposed to be safe.”

 

 

_IMAGE: a yellow paper folder, open, with a subject file in it_

_TRANSCRIPT:_

_SUBJECT: A MINYARD_

_HEIGHT: 5’0”_

_WEIGHT: 145lbs_

_PROFILE:_

_Blond Caucasian male. 13% body fat. High BMI, offset by high muscle mass._

_SUBJECT NOTES_

_Exposure to trial EX00476 resulted in addiction to Somnacin solution._

_Exposure to trial EX00482 resulted in negative reaction to Somnacin solution. Symptoms included shaking, vomiting, blurred eyesight, muscle spasms, dry mouth and labored breathing._

_Symptoms offset using 15ml Omnacsin for each 50ml of Somnacin._

_Exposure to EX00482 produced repeated negative reaction to Somnacin solution to all subsequent trials. RECOMMENDATION: continue using 15ml Omnacsin for each 50ml of Somnacin._

 

_TRIAL RESULTS SUMMARY_

_EX00707: 15 minutes 0 seconds in dream time. 22 kills._  
_EX00704: 8 minutes 27 seconds in dream time. 12 kills._  
_EX00703: 12 minutes 56 seconds in dream time. 18 kills._  
_EX00701: 9 minutes 34 seconds in dream time. 16 kills._  
_EX00699: 9 minutes 25 seconds in dream time. 15 kills._  
_EX00697: 9 minutes 21 seconds in dream time. 13 kills._  
_EX00695: 14 minutes 11 seconds in dream time. 19 kills._  
_EX00692: 11 minutes 8 seconds in dream time. 20 kills._  
_EX00690: 15 minutes 0 seconds in dream time. 26 kills._  
_EX00687: 13 minutes 48 seconds in dream time. 18 kills._  
_EX00686: 12 minutes 39 seconds in dream time. 16 kills._  
_EX00684: 11 minutes 17 seconds in dream time. 18 kills._  
_EX00682: 15 minutes 0 seconds in dream time. 21 kills._  
_EX00680: 15 minutes 0 seconds in dream time. 24 kills._

_Page 1 of 12_

 

 

“We could do something else,” says Neil. “Something completely different.”

Andrew gives him an unimpressed look. “You would give up dreamsharing.”

Neil shrugs. He’s never had the chance to think about what he’d like to do with his life before. It’s not as if he went to high school and had career guidance, after all. He fell back on dreamsharing because it pays well and because he’s good at it; an easy way to get himself the funds to stay on the move. And yes, because he enjoys it. But his shrugs says it all: he’d give it up for Andrew.

Their proposal is simple - go corporate.

Dreamsharing hasn’t even been publicly acknowledged by world governments yet, which means that there are no laws about it; that’s why things like the human Somnacin trials can exist. There are obviously people who know about it, or they wouldn’t have any clients, but all of Neil’s jobs so far have been illegal – break into someone’s mind and steal a chemical formula or find out if they’re cheating on their spouse.

What they want to do now is a more harmless version of what Dan and Matt do - run all-immersive virtual reality experiences. Andrew had snorted when Neil came up with that phrase. They’ll screen any potential clients for medical issues, and find out what kind of dream they’re looking for before agreeing to take the job; Andrew will run the business end of things and Neil will run the dreams since he can forge.

They won't start up immediately. It takes a lot of paperwork to set up a company, as it happens, and Neil wants to travel for pleasure rather than work. He'd mentioned Renee to Andrew; her dreamsharing therapy practice might be useful for their own venture and he's curious as to how accurate Andrew's projection of her is. They did invite Kevin to join, but he turned them down. He’s always been more interested in the theoretical, the possibilities of dreamsharing, and he’s appealing to join a new research team funded by the government, his record having been reinstated after Riko’s death.

Reaching for the packet of cigarettes at the back of his jeans, Andrew clicks his old lighter a couple of times. It doesn’t work, of course, but it prompts Neil to toss him the cheap plastic lighter on the coffee table. The sofa dips as Andrew rolls off it to slide open the balcony doors.

The stray cat they sometimes see around the apartment block is there, enormous and fluffy and disdainful of the way Andrew flicks a hand at it to shoo it away. It ignores Andrew and Andrew ignores it back, lighting up his cigarette in the blustery weather. He inhales his first drag.

“I don’t need this self-sacrificial shit from you.”

“It’s not self-sacrificial,” says Neil. “But if you’re not going to be there, it doesn’t matter to me.”

“That’s worse,” says Andrew, deadpan. “ _Sentimentality_.”

Neil huffs in exasperation, and reaches for the coffee table. On the table is Neil’s laptop; open on the screen is the latest message from a corporate lawyer they’ve been consulting. “I’ll tell her to send over the documents.”

There’s a silence as Neil drafts up an email reply.

“I will be there,” says Andrew eventually. “I’ll be up top, watching your stupid back.”

Neil’s back is to Andrew, so he can’t see the grin that splits across Neil’s face, but Neil suspects he can hear it in Neil’s voice anyway. “I know.”

 

 

_IMAGE: A reception of an office. It is white with highlights of office. The sign above the reception desk says 'JOSTEN & MINYARD'. At the bottom of the image, it says 'OPENING SOON enquiries@jostenandminyard.com'_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's doneeeeeee!! *weeps*
> 
> Thank you all so, so much for sticking around for the ride. Please leave a comment, kudos, or come talk to me on tumblr!

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [tumblr](http://defractum.tumblr.com)!


End file.
